t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of

JAPANESE LITERATURE

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a
history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the
premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged
topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and
reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser-known,
popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of
modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of
recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also
places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing
and provides comprehensive coverage of women’s literature as well as new
popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive
bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore
this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

Ha r u o Sh i r a n e, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia

University, is a specialist in Japanese literature and culture, with interests in
prose fiction, poetry, and drama; the interaction between popular and elite
cultures; and issues of cultural memory. He is the author and editor of over
twenty books. His most recent book, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons
(2012), explores the cultural construction of nature across a wide spectrum of
media and arts.
To m i Su z u k i, Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, is a
specialist in nineteeth- and twentieth-century Japanese literature, with special
interests in prose fiction and criticism; gender and genre; modernism and
language reform; and history of reading and canon formation. Her
publications include Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (1996) and
Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (2000).
Da v i d Lu r i e, Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature at
Columbia University, specializes in the literary, cultural, and intellectual
history of premodern Japan. His research concerns the development of writing
and literacy; the history of linguistic thought; and Japanese and comparative
mythology. His first book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing
(2011), treated the advent of Japanese inscription and the early development of
literature and other modes of writing.
 THE CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF
JAPANESE LITERATURE
*

Edited by
HARUO SHIRANE
and
TOMI SUZUKI
with
DAVID LURIE
 University Printing House, Cambridge c b 2 8b s, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
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© Cambridge University Press 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
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i s b n 978-1-107-02903-3 Hardback
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accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of illustrations xiii

List of contributors xiv
Acknowledgments xvii
A note on Romanization and conventions xviii
Chronological table xix

General introduction 1
haruo shirane

part i
THE ANCIENT PERIOD (BEGINNINGS TO 794) 13

1 Introduction: writing, literacy, and the origins of Japanese literature 15

david lurie

2 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works 22
david lurie

3 Songs of the Records and Chronicles 40

torquil duthie

4 Fudoki gazetteers 45
david lurie

5 Man’yōshū 50
h. mack horton

6 Anthologization and Sino-Japanese literature: Kaifūsō and the three

imperial anthologies 86
w i e b k e d e n ec k e

v
 Contents

part ii
THE HEIAN PERIOD (794–1185) 93

7 Introduction: court culture, women, and the rise of vernacular

literature 95
haruo shirane

8 Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus and statesman 102

r o ber t bo r g en

9 Kokinshū and Heian court poetry 110

g u s ta v h e l d t

10 Early Heian court tales 121

j o s hu a s . m o s t o w

11 Genji monogatari and its reception 129

s a to k o na i t o

12 Late courtly romance 140

joshua s. mostow

13 Premodern commentary on the classical literary canon 157

l ew i s c o o k

14 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon 161

haruo shirane

15 Heian literary diaries: from Tosa nikki to Sarashina nikki 165

s o n ja a r n t ze n

16 The Heian Academy: literati culture from Minamoto no Shitagō to Ōe no

Masafusa 176
b r i a n s t e i n in g e r

17 Heian canons of Chinese poetry: Wakan rōeishū and Bai Juyi 184
ivo smits

18 The Literary Essence of Our Court (Honchō monzui) 188

w i e b k e d en e c k e

vi
 Contents

19 Vernacular histories: Eiga monogatari, Ōkagami, Gukanshō 193

el i z a b e t h o y le r

20 Heian popular songs: imayō and Ryōjin hishō 206

ivo s mi ts

part iii
THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD (1185–1600) 209

21 Introduction to medieval literature 211

h a r u o s h ir an e

22 Japanese poetic thought, from earliest times to the thirteenth

century 218
a. e. commons

23 Shinkokin wakashū: The New Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese

Poetry 230
paul s. atkins

24 Waka in the medieval period: patterns of practice and patronage 238

s t e v e n d . c ar t e r

25 Hyakunin isshu and the popularization of classical poetry 256

tomomi yoshino

26 Medieval recluse literature: Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō 259

j a c k s t o n em a n

27 Medieval women’s diaries: from Tamakiwaru to Takemukigaki 268

c h r i s t i n a l a f f in

28 Setsuwa (anecdotal) literature: Nihon ryōiki to Kokon chomonjū 280

haruo shirane

29 The rise of medieval warrior tales: Hōgen monogatari and Heiji

monogatari 287
e l iz a be t h o y l e r

vii
 Contents

30 The Tales of the Heike 295

david t. bialock

31 The late medieval warrior tales: from Soga monogatari to Taiheiki 306
e l iz a be t h o y l e r

32 Literature of medieval Zen temples: Gozan (Five Mountains) and Ikkyū

Sōjun 311
sonja arntzen

33 Renga (linked verse) 317

s t e v en d . c a r t e r

34 Noh drama 328

n o e l pi n n i n g t o n

35 Noh drama theory from Zeami to Zenchiku 340

a r t h u r h . t h o r n h i l l ii i

36 Kyōgen: comic plays that turn medieval society upside down 347
laurence kominz

37 Late medieval popular fiction and narrated genres: otogizōshi,

kōwakamai, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri 355
r . k e l l er k im b r o u g h

part iv
THE EDO PERIOD (1600–1867) 371

38 Introduction to early modern Japanese literature 373

h a r u o s h ir an e

39 Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 382
p. f. kornicki

40 A forest of books: seventeenth-century Kamigata commercial prose 396

laura moretti

41 The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa 403
haruo shirane

viii
 Contents

42 Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki: the literature of urban townspeople 415
paul schalow

43 Representing theater: text and performance in kabuki and bunraku 424

c. andrew gerstle

44 Puppet theater: from early jōruri to the golden age 437

janice kanemitsu

45 From the beginnings of kabuki to the playwrights Nanboku and

Mokuami 447
satoko shimazaki

46 Early to mid-Edo kanshi 457

j u d i t h n . r a bi n o v i t c h a n d t i m o t h y r . b r a d s t o c k

47 Kanshibun in the late Edo period 465

m a t t h e w fr a le i g h

48 Waka practice and poetics in the Edo period 471

roger thomas

49 Literary thought in Confucian ancient learning and Kokugaku 479

p e t e r fl u e c k ig e r

50 Bunjin (literati) and early yomihon: Nankaku, Nankai, Buson, Gennai,

Teishō, Ayatari, and Akinari 488
l a w r e n c e e . m a r c ea u

51 Satiric poetry: Kyōshi, Kyōka, and Senryū 503

haruo shirane

52 Picture books: from akahon to kibyōshi and gōkan 510

michael emmerich

53 The birth of kokkeibon (comic novellas) 523

masahiro tanahashi

54 Ninjōbon and romances for women 532

y a s u s h i in o u e

ix
 Contents

55 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei

Bakin 539
y ō j i ō taka

part v
THE MODERN PERIOD (1868 TO PRESENT) 551

56 Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language 553

tomi suzuki

57 Kanshibun in the Meiji period and beyond 572

m a t t h e w f r a l ei g h

58 Translated fiction, political fiction 578

dennis washburn

59 Newspaper serials in the late nineteenth century 583

s a t o r u s ai t o

60 Translation, vernacular style, and the Westernesque femme fatale in

modern Japanese literature 588
i n d r a l ev y

61 The rise of modern women’s literature 598

rebecca copeland

62 Melodrama, family romance, and the novel at the turn of the

century 605
k e n k. it o

63 Modern Japanese poetry to the 1910s 613

kō j i k a w a m o t o

64 Between the Western and the traditional: Mori Ōgai, Nagai Kafū, and
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 623
shu n ji ch ib a

65 Natsume Sōseki and the theory and practice of literature 634

m i c h a e l k. bo u r d a g h s

x
 Contents

66 A new era of women writers 641

j oa n e . er i cson

67 Literary marketplace, politics, and history: 1900s–1940s 648

h i d e o ka m e i a n d k y o k o k u r i t a

68 Canonization and popularization: anthologies and literary prizes 669

e d w ar d m a c k

69 Colonialism, translation, literature: Takahama Kyoshi’s passage to

Korea 672
serk-bae suh

70 Primitivism and imperial literature of Taiwan and the South Seas 677
r o b er t t ie r n e y

71 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early

1950s 682
se ij i m . l ippi t

72 Japanese literature and cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s 692
hirokazu toeda

73 Modern drama 702

m. cody poulton

74 Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar period 711

t o s h i k o e ll i s

75 Trends in postwar literature, 1945–1970s 719

k e n s u k e kō n o a n d a n n s h e r i f

76 Women’s fiction in the postwar era 737

sharalyn orbaugh

77 The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’ culture 748

yu ik a kit amura

78 Modern Japanese literature from Okinawa 753

d a v in d er l . b h o w m ik

xi
 Contents

79 Postwar Zainichi writings: politics, language, and identity 756

m e l i ssa l. w en d er

80 Contemporary Japanese fiction 760

s t e p h e n s n y d er

Bibliography of English secondary sources and translations 768

Index 821

xii
 Illustrations

1 From Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō (1811). Readers of illustrated fiction

engaged in a discussion of “red books.” Waseda University Library
Special Collections. 511
2 A spread from Fūryū ittsui otoko (1758), with pictures in the Torii style.
Typical is the abundance of curves, including those that divide the
scenes. Tōyō Bunko. 521
3 Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas, trans. Matt Thorn (Seattle, 2012).
Juli talks to Erich about his feelings toward the deceased Thomas.
Juli’s thoughts are represented outside the balloons. Fantagraphics
Books. 751

xiii
 Contributors

Sonja Arntzen (University of Toronto Emerita)

Paul S. Atkins (University of Washington)
Davinder L. Bhowmik (University of Washington)
David T. Bialock (University of Southern California)
Robert Borgen (University of California, Davis Emeritus)
Michael K. Bourdaghs (University of Chicago)
Timothy R. Bradstock (University of Montana)
Steven D. Carter (Stanford University)
Shunji Chiba (Waseda University)
A. E. Commons (University of Alberta)
Lewis Cook (Queens College of the City University of New York)
Rebecca Copeland (Washington University in St. Louis)
Wiebke Denecke (Boston University)
Torquil Duthie (University of California, Los Angeles)
Toshiko Ellis (University of Tokyo)
Michael Emmerich (University of California, Los Angeles)
Joan E. Ericson (Colorado College)
Peter Flueckiger (Pomona College)
Matthew Fraleigh (Brandeis University)
C. Andrew Gerstle (SOAS, University of London)
Gustav Heldt (University of Virginia)
Yasushi Inoue (National Defense Academy of Japan)
Ken K. Ito (University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa)
Hideo Kamei (Hokkaido University Emeritus)
Janice Kanemitsu (Cornell University)
Kōji Kawamoto (University of Tokyo Emeritus)
R. Keller Kimbrough (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Yuika Kitamura (Kobe University)
Laurence Kominz (Portland State University)

xiv
 List of contributors

Kensuke Kōno (Nihon University)

P. F. Kornicki (University of Cambridge)
Kyoko Kurita (Pomona College)
Christina Laffin (University of British Columbia)
Indra Levy (Stanford University)
Seiji M. Lippit (University of California, Los Angeles)
David Lurie (Columbia University)
Edward Mack (University of Washington)
H. Mack Horton (University of California, Berkeley)
Lawrence E. Marceau (University of Auckland)
Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge)
Joshua S. Mostow (University of British Columbia)
Satoko Naito (University of Maryland, College Park)
Sharalyn Orbaugh (University of British Columbia)
Yōji Ōtaka (National Institute of Japanese Literature)
Elizabeth Oyler (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
Noel Pinnington (University of Arizona)
M. Cody Poulton (University of Victoria)
Judith N. Rabinovitch (University of Montana)
Satoru Saito (Rutgers University)
Paul Schalow (Rutgers University)
Ann Sherif (Oberlin College)
Satoko Shimazaki (University of Southern California)
Haruo Shirane (Columbia University)
Ivo Smits (Leiden University)
Stephen Snyder (Middlebury College)
Brian Steininger (Princeton University)
Jack Stoneman (Brigham Young University)
Serk-Bae Suh (University of California, Irvine)
Tomi Suzuki (Columbia University)
Masahiro Tanahashi (Teikyō University)
Roger Thomas (Illinois State University)
Arthur H. Thornhill III (University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa)
Robert Tierney (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
Hirokazu Toeda (Waseda University)
Dennis Washburn (Dartmouth College)
Melissa L. Wender (Independent Scholar)
Tomomi Yoshino (Chuo University)

xv
 Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the editors of two previous incarnations of this project,

Edward Kamens and Peter Kornicki, who provided the foundation for this
book. We need to thank Michiko Tsuneda, our remarkable and tireless
managing editor, Lewis Cook, who provided invaluable editorial assistance,
and Kris Reeves and Rachel Staum, our outstanding research assistants.
Without the dedication of Thomas Gaubatz, who was a superb copyeditor,
this project would never have been completed. We give special recognition
to the translators of several chapters in this volume: Michael Emmerich,
Thomas Gaubatz, Kristopher Reeves, and Charles Woolley.
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Nitta Publication Fund
of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University, the
Shinchosha Foundation, and the Department of East Asian Languages and
Cultures at Columbia University. Work on chapters 1, 2, 4, and 27 was
supported by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean
Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103).

xvii
 A note on Romanization and conventions

All Romanization of Japanese names and terms follows the Hepburn system.
East Asian names are written in the traditional order (surname followed by
given name), except in cases when a person publishes in English using their
given name followed by surname. Romanization of Chinese names and
terms follows the Pinyin system except in quotations of translations using
the older Wade-Giles system, which have been left unchanged. Romanized
titles are in lower case after the initial letter, unless they include proper
nouns.
In order to reduce the number of references, all cited English-language
sources on Japanese literature can be found in the bibliography, which covers
major English-language publications and is organized by text, genre, and
period in parallel to the chapters of the book. A handful of Japanese language
references appear in footnotes, but such citations have been kept to a
minimum.
Because the variety of approaches to rendering such Japanese words in
English reflects debates within the field, we have avoided imposing an
artificial unity on translations of titles and terms. Sometimes a genitive
article “no” is added between the surname and given name of premodern
individuals, as in Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune of the Minamoto
family), but we have allowed authors to follow their own inclinations about
whether to include this article.

xviii
 Chronological table

Ancient period (beginnings to 794)

Jōmon 14,000–900 BCE
Yayoi 900 BCE–250 CE
Tomb 250–552
Asuka 552–710
Jinshin War 672
Nara 710–94

Heian period (794–1185)

Medieval period (1185–1600)
Kamakura 1185–1333
Fall of the Heike 1185
Jōkyū Rebellion 1221
Kenmu Restoration 1333–6
Northern and Southern Courts (Nanboku-chō) 1336–92
Muromachi 1392–1573
Ōnin War 1467–77
Warring States (Sengoku) 1467–1573
Azuchi-Momoyama 1573–98

Edo (Tokugawa, early modern) period (1600–1867)

Battle of Sekigahara 1600

xix
 Chronological table

Modern period (1868 to present)

Meiji 1868–1912
Taishō 1912–26
Shōwa 1926–89
Heisei 1989–present

xx
 General introduction
haruo shirane

This book is organized according to the major periods of Japanese history –

ancient (up to 794), Heian (794–1185), medieval (1185–1600), early modern or
Edo (1600–1867), and modern (1868–present). Each part begins with a brief
historical overview, followed by short essays on major genres, texts, and
authors. A number of the traditional genres – such as waka (classical Japanese
poetry), kanshi (classical Chinese poetry), monogatari (tale literature), setsuwa
(anecdotal literature), and gunki-mono (warrior narratives) – span multiple
periods, so some entries cover a time-span beyond the section in which they
appear. As a literary history, this book attempts to cover the so-called
masterpieces of Japanese literature – from The Tale of Genji and The Tales of
the Heike to such major modern authors as Natsume Sōseki – and to provide a
balanced view of key genres and themes. At the same time, it is also intended
to shed light on many genres that have been overlooked in the modern
conception of Japanese literature, examining them from a perspective not
limited to European notions of literary history.
Japan has one of the richest and most complex literary traditions in the
world, and defining and describing it is difficult. Indeed, it is only in recent
decades, as popular genres and the enormous tradition of Literary Sinitic or
Sino-Japanese (kanbun) writings have received renewed attention alongside
better-studied materials, that the full complexity and variety of the Japanese
literary heritage has come into view. The modern term for “Japanese litera-
ture” (Nihon bungaku) came to mean literature written in the “Japanese”
language, using the native writing system based on kana (hiragana and
katakana), a vernacular syllabary developed in the ancient period and in fairly
common use by the ninth century. Such a definition, taken to its logical
conclusion, extends beyond Japan’s present borders and would include writ-
ing in Japanese by Koreans or Taiwanese during the long periods of Japanese
occupation in the twentieth century or by early Japanese immigrants to
California or Brazil.

1
 haruo shirane

“Japanese literature” also can mean literature written by so-called ethnic

Japanese, who were concentrated in the area from northern Kyushu along
the Inland Sea to the Kinai region (the area of present-day Osaka, Kyoto, and
Nara) and beyond to the Kantō region (centered on modern Tokyo), most of
whom came under the rule of the Yamato clan (the ancestor of the imperial
family), which came to dominate the rest of the archipelago (excluding
Hokkaido and Okinawa) in the seventh and eighth centuries. This definition
of “Japanese literature” includes writings in literary Chinese (Literary Sinitic
or kanbun), the common written language of East Asia (the regions that are
now China, the Koreas, Vietnam, and Japan) and the mainstay of literary,
religious, and government writing in Japan for the premodern and early
modern periods. One of the major characteristics of Japanese literary culture
is that for most of its written history it has constantly used both the
vernacular syllabary and Literary Sinitic, with classical Chinese (both its
syntax and its graphic compounds) always influencing the native
vernacular, and a mixture of the two merging in various styles, particularly
the wakan-konkō-bun (mixed Japanese–Chinese style) that became dominant
from the late Heian period. Basing a definition of Japanese literature on the
notion of ethnic Japanese, however, is problematic since the borders of Japan
gradually expanded to include areas inhabited by other ethnicities: north-
eastern Honshū and the island of Hokkaido (the home of the Ainu), the
Ryūkyū Islands (now Okinawa), and then, in the twentieth century (until
1945), Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. This history does not exclude either
sense of “Japanese literature,” but employs both as organizing principles in
order to present a more complete picture of Japanese literary traditions.
Another distinctive feature of this book is that modern works have been
given far more space than in previous literary histories, due to their increased
role in today’s curriculum and global influence on popular and contemporary
culture. This modern section embraces both canonical writers (such as
Sōseki, Ōgai, Tanizaki, and Kawabata) and the non-canonical, including
such subgenres as detective fiction and girls’ manga. It is distinguished by
its wide sociocultural scope (incorporating popular culture and contempor-
ary literature, often not recognized in literary histories, and including ethnic
Koreans writing in Japanese) and by its trans-national, trans-regional perspec-
tive, covering the colonial period literature of Okinawa and of occupied
Korea and Taiwan. If, in the premodern and early modern periods, the
metropole was China (both imagined and real), in the modern period it
became Japan (specifically Tokyo), which stood at the center of a vast empire,
mirroring those created by the British, the French, and other European

2
 General introduction

powers. In short, this literary history deliberately complicates the notions of

Japanese as language and as ethnic identity and the relationship of both to
various forms and genres of writing. The remainder of this introduction takes
up major characteristics of premodern and early modern literature that set it
apart from modern Japanese literature, which fuses with and shares in
modern European literary genres and cultural discourse.
The notion of Japanese literature as a national literature (kokubungaku)
based on a national language (kokugo) that precluded the use of languages
other than kana-based Japanese vernacular emerged as part of modern
nation-state building in the Meiji period (1868–1912), particularly after the
Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), in which China was defeated by Japan and lost its
preeminent place as the center of cultural and linguistic authority. But
premodern notions of literature were very different. The Genji ippon kyō
(The Genji One-Volume Sutra, 1176), a Buddhist text written by Priest
Chōken in the late twelfth century, reveals that the genre hierarchy as it
existed in the late Heian and early medieval periods was, roughly, from top to
bottom: (1) Buddhist scriptures; (2) Confucian texts; (3) histories such as the
Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian); (4) Chinese belles-lettres (bun) such as
the Wenxuan (Anthology of Literature), a collection of Chinese poetry and
literary prose; (5) Japanese classical poetry; and (6) vernacular tales and sōshi,
that is, nikki (diaries) and related writings in kana. The genre hierarchy here
follows the Chinese model, with religious/philosophical texts, histories, and
poetry held in the highest regard and fiction relegated to the lowest rung. At
the bottom stood the two genres in the Japanese syllabary, waka and mono-
gatari, with poetry holding a much higher status than prose fiction in kana.
Cultural authority also was a major element in this genre hierarchy. The top
four categories, the most prestigious genres, were identified primarily with
China (Kara) – the metropole of civilization at the time. The two bottom
genres, by contrast, were identified with Japan (Yamato).
In the eighteenth century, scholars of Kokugaku (nativist learning), led
by such figures as Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Motoori Norinaga
(1730–1801), attacked what they perceived to be foreign influences and con-
structed an alternative sphere of learning based on what they saw as purely
Japanese texts. These scholars of nativist learning, whose influence was
limited until the modern period, attempted to invert the genre hierarchy
found in texts such as the Genji ippon kyō. They placed works in the Japanese
syllabary, such as waka and monogatari, at the top, while attempting to de-
canonize the top four categories, especially Buddhist and Confucian texts and
Chinese poetry and histories. It was not until the mid-Meiji period, with the

3
 haruo shirane

rise of modern nationalism, the influence of Western phonocentricism, the

emphasis on “national language” (kokugo) based on kana, and the defeat of
China in the Sino-Japanese War, that this inversion became irreversible.
Throughout the premodern period, gakumon, the Japanese word for learning,
meant Kangaku (Chinese studies), which was the center of various premodern
discourses, and it was not until the establishment of kokubungaku (national
literature) in the mid-Meiji period that Japanese literature became largely,
though not entirely, kana-based literature.
Equally importantly, the modern notion of Japanese literature was for-
mulated in large part under the influence of European notions of literature,
which had placed high value on such genres as the epic and drama, and that,
from the nineteenth century, elevated the novel to the pinnacle of the genre
hierarchy. But owing to both Confucian and Buddhist influences, fiction
occupied a very low position in the premodern Japanese textual hierarchy,
and the performance arts, including noh, jōruri, and kabuki, were not con-
sidered at all. Theater, while culturally important, had never been considered
a form of literature until the modern period, when there was a desperate hunt
for Japan’s Shakespeare, a role that Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), the
puppet-theater playwright, was made to fulfill. Today, the Genroku era
(1688–1704) is best known for the poetry, prose fiction, and drama of
Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), and Chikamatsu
Monzaemon, respectively. But this view leaves out the two most prominent
writers of the period, Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728),
both influential Confucian scholars who wrote essays and treatises in classical
Chinese. Such emphases are driven in part by modern notions of literature.
But in order to understand the significance of the premodern and early
modern works, authors, and genres discussed in this book, it is necessary to
expand the “literary” beyond the modern notion of literature as “imagina-
tive” or “creative” writing to recover its earlier functions, which encom-
passed what are now the disciplinary fields of history, religion, philosophy,
philology, and political science.
Due to the close association of literary activity with the imperial
court and the upper aristocracy, which provided crucial patronage for
literary production, much early literature had a dual private/public
character, which is embodied in the function of classical Japanese poetry,
the thirty-one-syllable waka, which became the central vernacular genre
in the premodern period. Indeed, in Heian aristocratic society it was
impossible to function without the ability to compose waka. At the
imperial court, classical Japanese poetry had a public role, often in the

4
 General introduction

ritual affirmation of power and social hierarchy, as well as a private, social

role, as an intimate form of dialogue and an indispensible vehicle for
courtship. This duality is also evident in the Kokinshū (Anthology of Old
and New Japanese Poetry, early tenth century), the most influential of the
imperial poetry anthologies, which was commissioned by the emperor
and served to enhance the cultural authority of the throne but which drew
most of its poems from private exchanges and collections. Literary
Chinese verse (kanshi) had a similar dual character, composed in promi-
nent public gatherings like court banquets and poetry parties and collected
in imperial anthologies that preceded the Kokinshū, but also serving as a
medium for educated elite male courtiers like Sugawara no Michizane
(845–903) to record personal emotions and experiences.
Early compilations, such as the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720),
commissioned by the Yamato court in the early eighth century at a critical
period in state building, and the Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves, late
eighth century), similarly affirmed the power and authority of the head of the
Yamato clan (imperial family) even as they included poems and stories about
commoners and non-court figures. By contrast, the vernacular monogatari
(court tales) and collections of setsuwa (anecdotal literature) of the tenth
through twelfth centuries, written and edited by middle- to lower-rank
aristocrats or aristocratic priests, represent alternative voices, often those
out of power. The function of much of the vernacular literary culture in the
Heian period, particularly after the tenth and eleventh centuries, is thus very
different from that of the ancient period. The center of political power had
shifted from sovereigns to regents, from the throne to non-imperial clans
(primarily the Fujiwara), who controlled the emperor through marriage
politics. New power also devolved to the provincial governors (middle and
lower levels of the aristocracy), over whom the state ministries had increas-
ingly less control.
The Heian monogatari continued to deal with the lives of the nobility and
the emperor, but in contrast to works like the Man’yōshū, which enforce the
authority, power, and divinity of the sovereign and his or her surrogates,
the monogatari violate the sociopolitical order and relativize the authority of
the throne. The protagonists of Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise, tenth
century) and Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, early eleventh century)
belong to clans (Ariwara and Genji/Minamoto) that were ousted. Instead of
affirming the dominant clan (the northern branch of the Fujiwara), The Tales
of Ise, for example, reveals deep sympathy for those who it had defeated or
overshadowed.

5
 haruo shirane

Sympathy for political losers and expression of alternative social voices

become major features of the monogatari genre and continue into the
medieval period with, for example, Heike monogatari (The Tales of the
Heike, initially compiled in the thirteenth century), a warrior tale that
portrays the fall of the house of the Heike (Taira). In contrast to The Tale of
Genji, The Tales of the Heike were sung by traveling minstrels (often to an
uneducated populace) and had the ritualistic function of pacifying the spirits
of the dead (the defeated warriors) depicted in the long tale. The Masukagami
(Clear Mirror, fourteenth century), one of the four vernacular “mirrors” or
chronicles of political leaders, looks back nostalgically to the exiled emperors
GoToba and GoDaigo at a time when the power of the imperial court was in
rapid decline. On the other hand, two mid-Heian period historical chronicles,
Eiga monogatari (Tales of Flowering Fortunes, early twelfth century) and
Ōkagami (Great Mirror, twelfth century), both also written in the vernacular,
portray the life and political rise of Fujiwara no Michinaga, the most powerful
regent in the Heian period. But even these vernacular texts give voice to
those who were defeated (such as Sugawara no Michizane, who had been a
powerful minister until he was exiled by the Fujiwara), thus providing an
“unofficial” political and cultural history of the period.
Historically, the center of vernacular poetry shifted from the chōka (found
in the early Man’yōshū), to the thirty-one-syllable waka (the central form of
the Kokinshū and the Heian period), to linked verse in the medieval period,
and finally in the early modern period to the seventeen-syllable hokku
(developed as the first verse of popular linked verse, and only later called
haiku). Such a gradual paring-down of form and expression occurs in a wide
variety of contexts and media: poetry, noh drama, landscape gardening,
bonsai, tea ceremony, and ink painting, to mention only the most obvious.
One result is that many traditional Japanese literary forms stress brevity,
condensation, and overtones. A parallel development in the kanshi tradition
was an emphasis on exemplary couplets taken from longer poems, as seen in
the highly influential eleventh-century anthology Wakan rōeishū (Collection
of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing), which assembled such short gems
from Literary Sinitic compositions by Japanese and Chinese authors and
paired them with waka.
As it evolved under Zeami (c. 1363–c. 1443), its greatest playwright, noh was
a drama of elegance, restraint, and suggestion. Human actions were reduced
to the bare essentials, to highly symbolic movements such as tilting the mask
to express joy or sweeping the hand to represent weeping. In Kakyō (A Mirror
Held to the Flower, 1424), Zeami writes that “if what the actor feels in the

6
 General introduction

heart is ten, what appears in movement should be seven.” He stresses that the
point at which physical movement becomes minute and then finally stops is
the point of greatest intensity. Physical and visual restrictions – the fixed
mask, the slow body movement, the almost complete absence of props or
scenery – create a drama that must occur as much in the mind of the audience
as on the stage.
In Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1329–33), sometimes considered the
ultimate compendium of Heian court aesthetics, the aristocrat-priest Kenkō
argues that what is not stated, cannot be seen by the eyes, and is incomplete
in expression is more moving, alluring, and memorable than what is directly
presented. Since ancient times, Japanese aristocrats prized the social capacity
for indirection and suggestion. Poetry was recognized for its overtones,
connotations, and subtle allegory and metaphor more than for what it
actually stated. In large part, this literary and social mode depends on a
close bond between the composer and the reader, with a common body of
cultural knowledge, which was absorbed through literary texts.
At the same time that noh drama reached its height and Tsurezuregusa was
being written, another kind of gunki-mono (warrior narrative) emerged in the
form of the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace, c. 1370), which was to have
more impact on Japanese popular culture, including theater, than perhaps any
other text from the medieval period. The Taiheiki, which depicts the bloody
military conflicts that occurred during the era of the divided imperial courts
(1336–92), has little interest in the aesthetics of overtones or the refined
associations of classical poetry; instead, it depicts the dog-eat-dog world of
the warriors, military trickery, brutal massacres, and rampant fear of
vengeful spirits. At the same time, it functioned as a kind of an educational
handbook for samurai, depicting the heroism, loyalty, wisdom, ingenuity,
brutality, and betrayal of Japanese warriors in the context of famous incidents
from Chinese history. The Taiheiki, which became the fundamental
material for storytelling (called Taiheiki-yomi) in the Edo period, is a
vivid reminder that premodern Japanese literature cannot be measured solely
by the refined aesthetics (noh drama, tea ceremony, ink painting, linked
verse, Zen kanshi poetry) that medieval culture is now famous for.
Confucianism and Buddhism were imported from the continent in the
ancient period, and provided two major value systems that often came into
dramatic conflict. Confucianism became the guide for ethical behavior and
social and political relations, based largely on strong familial bonds and filial
piety, which ideally mirrored the relationship of subjects to the ruler.
Buddhism stressed individual salvation, suffering, detachment, and

7
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protection from various dangers. Much of Japanese literature from the Nara
through the medieval eras stands in a larger Buddhist context that regards
excessive attachments – especially family bonds (of the sort emphasized by
Confucianism) and the deep emotions of love – as a serious deterrent to
individual salvation, particularly in a world in which all things are imperma-
nent. Each individual is bound to a cycle of life and death, to a world of
suffering and illusory attachment, until he or she achieves salvation.
By the mid-Heian period, it was believed that strong attachments, parti-
cularly at the point of death, would impede the soul’s progress to the next
world, which, it was hoped, would be the Pure Land, or Western Paradise. In
a typical noh play by Zeami, the protagonist is caught in one of the lower
realms – often as a wandering ghost or a person suffering in hell – as a result
of some deep attachment or resentment. For the warrior, the attachment is
often the bitterness or ignominy of defeat; for women, jealousy or the failure
of love; and for old men, the impotence of age. In Zeami’s “dream plays,”
such as the warrior play Atsumori, in which the protagonist (shite) appears in
the dream of a traveling monk (the waki or secondary figure), the protagonist
reenacts or recounts the source of his or attachment to the dreaming priest,
who offers prayers for his salvation and spiritual release.
Except for didactic literature composed by Buddhist priests, Heian verna-
cular fiction such as The Tale of Genji and women’s diaries such as Sarashina
nikki (Sarashina Diary, eleventh century) usually take a highly ambivalent
view of Buddhist ideals, focusing instead on the difficulty of attaining detach-
ment in a world of passion and natural beauty. Indeed, at the heart of
Japanese aristocratic literature, particularly from the mid-Heian period
onward, lies the conflict between Buddhistic aspirations of selflessness
(which eventually merged with samurai ideals in the medieval period) and
deep emotional attachment to nature and the human world. In Hōjōki
(Account of my Ten-Foot-Square Hut, early thirteenth century), the waka
poet Kamo no Chōmei (1153 or 1155–1216), confronted with a world of suffer-
ing and impermanence – natural disasters, famine, the destruction of the
capital – retreats to a small hut outside the capital. In the process of preparing
for rebirth in the Pure Land, however, he becomes attached to the tranquility
and pleasures of his rustic retreat and fears that his attachment to nature and to
writing will hinder his salvation.
Conflict tends to be internalized in much vernacular literature, often
creating highly psychological or lyrical works. In Zeami’s noh drama, for
example, the characters usually have no substantial external conflict. Instead,
the climax occurs when the protagonist is freed of internal attachment or is

8
 General introduction

reconciled to himself or herself. When the influence of Buddhism abated in

the Tokugawa period (an age of urban growth, capitalism, and commerce,
dominated by urban commoners), more secular plot paradigms became
prominent, such as the conflict between human desire or love (ninjō) and
social duty or obligation (giri), which lies at the heart of Chikamatsu
Monzaemon’s puppet plays (jōruri). Even so, the ultimate stress of the
literature and drama tends to be on intense emotions generated by or in
conflict with the pressures of society and social responsibility (supported by
Confucian ethics).
Though sometimes possessing elaborate and complex plot structures,
vernacular prose tends to be fragmentary and episodic, often focusing on
the elaboration of a particular mood or emotion. For example, in vernacular
fiction, the poetic diary, and theater (noh, jōruri), one of the most popular
scenes is the parting: a poetic topos that can be traced back to the poetry of
the Man’yōshū. The Tale of Genji is highlighted by a series of partings, which
culminate in the climactic death of the heroine. The same can be said of The
Tales of the Heike, a complex and detailed military epic that repeatedly focuses
on the terrible partings that war forces on human beings. The closeness of
traditional social ties – between parent and child, lord and retainer, husband
and wife, individual and group – make this an emotionally explosive situa-
tion, which is often presented in highly poetic language.
Japanese vernacular literature was rooted in a semi-oral narrative tradition
that either drew on imported texts from the continent or gathered locally
transmitted stories. This storytelling tradition, which came to the fore in the
late Heian and medieval periods when commoner culture began to surface,
included a wide assortment of myths, legends, anecdotes (setsuwa), and
folktales, often about strange, supernatural, or divine events. Buddhist priests
collected and categorized these stories, which included anecdotes from both
China and India, using them to preach to a largely illiterate audience. The
Konjaku monogatari shū (Anthology of Tales from the Past), which was
compiled in the late Heian period, is the most famous example of a collection
of such anecdotes. This storytelling tradition also appears in the form of
extended epic-like narratives like The Tales of the Heike, which was memorized
and chanted to the accompaniment of the biwa (lute) by blind minstrel-
priests, usually in short sessions that focused on one or two episodic sections.
One major consequence of this storytelling tradition is that Japanese
vernacular fiction tends to have a strong voice: one or more narrators
describe and comment on the action. The conventions of oral storytelling
are evident in almost all Japanese prose fiction, including highly

9
 haruo shirane

sophisticated, stream-of-consciousness narratives like The Tale of Genji. In

performance genres like The Tales of the Heike, noh drama, and sekkyō-bushi
(sermon ballads), this narrational voice flows over the action, dialogue, and
scenery, as first and third person narrations overlap. In noh, for example,
dialogue alternates with descriptive passages narrated by both the chorus and
the protagonist. The position of the narrator is most prominent in jōruri, in
which the chanter (gidayū), on a dais separate from the puppet stage, per-
forms both the dialogue of the puppets and the narration.
This double structure – action enveloped in descriptive narration – lends
itself to powerful lyric tragedy, in which the tone is elegant, poetic, and
uplifting even when the subject matter or situation is dark. The love suicide
plays by Chikamatsu, the greatest jōruri playwright, are one example. The
climactic travel scene (michiyuki) – a subcategory of the parting topos – is one of
tragedy and pathos: the lovers, who are traveling to the place of their death,
have resolved to be united in death rather than live under their present
circumstances. The scene is chanted to music and interwoven with allusions
to poetic places and classical poetry. The narration consequently elevates the
characters even as they die. The same can be said of climactic scenes in The Tale
of Genji or in the final chapter of The Tales of the Heike, when Kenreimon’in
reflects on the destruction of her clan. In most of these scenes descriptions of
nature and seasons, so central to Japanese vernacular poetry, suggest that death
is not an end but a return to nature. Except for some types of folk literature
(setsuwa), it is hard to find a work of premodern Japanese prose literature that
does not include poetry. Often poems spoken by characters or allusions to
classical verse (kanshi as well as waka) appear at such heightened moments,
condensing and intensifying their emotional significance.
Since the Renaissance, European theater has generally been split into three
basic forms – drama, opera, and ballet – whereas traditional Japanese theater
has combined these elements (with particular stress on music, dance, and song)
in each of the major dramatic forms: noh drama, jōruri (puppet theater), and
kabuki. One of the central principles of noh and jōruri is the jo-ha-kyū (intro-
duction, development, and finale), which regulates the tempo of the play,
particularly in relationship to dance and song. Even as it creates a window onto
another world, the work calls attention to itself as spectacle or ritual, as a
medium in which dance, song, costume, and mask play major roles.
The history of Japanese literary genres tends to be accretionary. Every
major historical era gave birth to new genres, but usually without the
abandonment of the earlier forms. The thirty-one-syllable waka (classical
poem) emerged in the Nara and Heian periods, classical linked verse in the

10
 General introduction

medieval period, haikai and hokku (later haiku) in the Edo period, and free
verse in the modern period (under the influence of Western poetry).
Alongside these vernacular forms the parallel kanshi tradition flourished
throughout history, shifting and expanding its contexts from the court, to
prominent Buddhist temples, to educated samurai and townspeople in the
Edo period, to newspapers and other new media in the late nineteenth
century. With the exception of linked verse and kanshi, all of these poetic
genres continue to flourish in present-day Japan. The same is true of drama.
Noh and its comic counterpart, kyōgen, emerged in the Muromachi period;
jōruri (puppet theater) and kabuki were dominant in the Tokugawa period;
and modern theater (shingeki) came to the fore in the twentieth century.
Instead of each new form displacing the previous one, these dramatic genres
continued to coexist, as they do even today.
Much of this remarkable continuity in poetry and drama as well as in the
other traditional arts (such as tea ceremony and flower arrangement) can be
attributed to the school or house system, with a family head and single-line
inheritance, which came to the fore in the late Heian period and which
resulted in a “living” tradition. From the Heian period onward, almost all
literary genres, particularly poetry, were composed in groups, with a teacher
or judge, who passed on the knowledge of the “way” (michi) of the genre or
art form. Reading, up through the Meiji period, was largely an oral and social
activity in which one person read the text aloud to others, who enjoyed the
rhythms of the language, including that of kanshi, which was known for its
sonorous qualities. Haiku remains popular today, with an estimated million
practitioners, not only because of the accessibility and popularity of this short
form but also because of the nature of the local social organizations that
gather mainly amateur poets together on a regular basis under the tutelage of
a professional teacher. As is clear from the final section of this book, even in
the modern period, authors (both poets and novelists) stood in lineages of
teacher to disciple, and formed literary circles that promoted the group and
its leaders through coterie journals.

11
 part i
*

THE ANCIENT PERIOD

(BEGINNINGS TO 794)
 1
Introduction: writing, literacy, and the
origins of Japanese literature
david lurie

Numerous problems of definition and scope confront any survey of the

beginnings of Japanese literature. We obviously have no direct access to
the stories and songs that circulated before the advent of writing. Some
features of this preliterate world can be extrapolated from later sources, but
this is difficult to do with any confidence because the writers of many early
texts deliberately engineer an impression of orality. In poetry – both verna-
cular (uta) and Chinese-style (shi) – it is also difficult to separate the mid to
late eighth-century anthologies (the Kaifūsō and the Man’yōshū) from the
historical milieux in which the poetry they collect was first composed and
appreciated. Scholars are interested in the unfolding of particular genres,
motifs, and techniques, but these anthologies themselves were shaped to
present their own selective and tendentious versions of such literary histories.
Similar difficulties pertain to prose, but in that case there is also the larger
problem of delineating the literary from other types of writing. Literate elites
of the eighth century devoted as much or more time to studying, composing,
and commenting on Confucian, Buddhist, technical, and legal writings as
they did to appreciating the rather small subset of prose works that are now
considered to be part of the canon of Nara period classics: the Kojiki (Record
of Ancient Matters, 712), Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), and the fudoki
gazetteers.
For all periods of premodern Japanese literature – and indeed, for all
premodern literatures – what survives is only a portion of the writings that
were produced, but this situation is more extreme for the Nara and early
Heian periods than for any subsequent point in Japanese history. The
circumstances of the fudoki make this abundantly clear. Five survive as
integral texts, only one of which is complete (that for Izumo Province).
The early eighth-century order that called for the production of these
works was directed at all of the provinces, of which there were then about
sixty, and quoted fragments survive from gazetteers for around forty of them.

15
 david lurie

If the lower figure reflects the number actually composed, only about
12 percent of the fudoki survive; actually it is probably closer to 10 percent.
Such high attrition is connected to the uncanonized status of these texts in
Heian and medieval Japan, but similar proportions of other genres met the
same fate. The Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves, c. 759) refers to older
poetry collections as sources (citing a half dozen by name), but none survives;
the prefaces to the Kojiki and the Kaifūsō (Florilegium of Cherished Airs, 751)
mention lost works, as does the Nihon shoki; and the content of the Nihon
shoki itself shows that it drew on various sources, none of which is extant.
Considering the broader situation down through the end of the Heian period,
approximately two thirds of the titles mentioned in the Honchō shojaku
mokuroku (a late thirteenth-century bibliography) no longer exist. Statistics
like these remind us that there is ample reason to be skeptical of literary-
historical generalizations based on extant works.
But such limitations, again, pertain to any premodern society, and com-
paratively the literature of early Japan is rather better known than that of
many other ancient traditions. Extensive works like the Nihon shoki and
Man’yōshū survive intact, and, to the best that we can ascertain, the extant
sources are representative of the range and variety of early writings. One
reason for the relative accessibility of ancient Japanese literature is the speed
with which it emerged: only about three generations separate the advent of
widespread literacy, in the mid seventh century, from the composition of the
oldest extant works in the early eighth century.
The first appearance of writing in the Japanese archipelago was much
earlier: inscriptions in Chinese characters on imported artifacts (mostly coins
and mirrors) are found starting around the last century BCE, in the late Yayoi
period. The first substantial inscriptions that were domestically produced
date to the fifth century CE, in the Tomb period, but there is no evidence that
significant numbers of people were able to read or write. Until the mid
seventh century literacy remained the province of specialist scribes –
migrants from the Korean peninsula and their descendants – who were
employed by the Yamato Kings, rulers from the area of modern Nara and
Osaka who presided over a loose federation of local potentates spanning the
archipelago from Northern Kyushu to the Kantō region. The importation of
Buddhism in the mid to late sixth century introduced new kinds of texts and
new modes of literacy, but these too remained narrow, specialized pursuits.
Writing had little meaning for a population to whom it was still just a
talismanically powerful symbol, to the extent that it mattered at all.
(Subsequent myth-making by eighth-century ideologues, most prominently

16
 Introduction: writing, literacy, and the origins of Japanese literature

in the Nihon shoki, suggests an earlier and more vigorous adaptation of

writing in general and Buddhist textuality in particular, but there is little
archaeological support for this narrative, and doubt has been cast on the
dating of most of the inscriptions traditionally associated with it.)
The change, when it came, was part of a much larger regional transforma-
tion of East Asia that followed the reunification of China under the Sui and
Tang dynasties in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, which led to the
emergence or expansion of states in peripheral regions. In 645, as conflict
among the three kingdoms of the Korean peninsula heated up, the Yamato
ruler later known as Tenji engineered a coup against the Soga lineage group,
who had dominated the court for two generations. The following decades
saw rapid construction of a Chinese-style state apparatus, complete with
census-taking, more systematic taxation, and a better-organized military,
especially after Yamato forces became involved in the final defeat of their
ally Paekche in 663. The resulting crisis further spurred development of a
bureaucracy, at the same time that literate refugees from the Korean penin-
sula were fleeing to the Japanese archipelago. The archaeological record
shows that the widespread use of writing for everyday communication and
record-keeping emerges in these decades, just as it became both necessary
and possible to staff a government based on texts. Not coincidentally, works
like the Kaifūsō and Man’yōshū also suggest that Tenji’s court in his new
capital in Ōmi (on Lake Biwa near modern Kyoto) was a center of literary
composition in both Chinese and vernacular styles. In monumental inscrip-
tions, poetry composed at court banquets, and other forms of writing, early
Japanese ideology followed the classical Chinese linkage of a well-ordered
state with well-ordered, aesthetically pleasing texts.
One reason for the rapidity of the seventh-century transformation of
literacy was the flexible relationship between spoken languages and texts
written in Chinese characters, then essentially the only form of writing in
East Asia. As a primarily logographic script at this moment in their history,
characters were associated with Chinese words and morphemes, but they
could also be linked to Korean or Japanese words and morphemes of similar
meanings. This meant that texts that had originally been written in Chinese
could be read in Korean or Japanese, in a process called kundoku (literally,
reading by gloss). Conversely, it was possible for someone who did not speak
Chinese to write a text that could be read in that language, by following in
reverse the kundoku procedure for rearranging the syntactical order of
character-texts. Chinese-style writing thus provided a common medium for
communication across linguistic and political boundaries; it was also a

17
 david lurie

powerful source of prestige and authority. But kundoku could be used to

write logographic texts that departed from the orthodox Chinese style in
their ordering and character usage, and it was also possible to use characters
phonographically, spelling out syllables of non-Chinese languages without
regard for the meaning of the words that had originally been associated with
those graphs. In short, the system of writing that was adapted in mid seventh-
century Japan involved multiple principles and styles of inscription, and was
well suited to the various demands placed on it by an age of political
transformation and literary innovation.
Already from the mid seventh century, archaeological discoveries of
wooden tablets inscribed in ink (mokkan) show the range of available
styles, from Chinese-style logography, to more localized logographic
writing that could not be read in Chinese, to mixtures of logographic
and phonographic characters, to entirely phonographic texts. The details
remain unclear, but parallels with discoveries in Korean sites, and the
well-documented contributions of scribes and refugees from the Korean
peninsula, suggest that many of these techniques were imported. At any
rate they were all being used to write texts in Old Japanese by the
second half of the seventh century. A handful of these artifacts are
belletristic works – mainly vernacular poems (uta) written phonographi-
cally – but we must rely on eighth-century sources for a fuller picture of
the emergence of Japanese literature.
The political impetus for the creation of the earliest extant works was
provided by the state-building activities of Tenji’s successors. His death in 671
was followed by the Jinshin War, a brief conflict that pitted his brother, later
known as Tenmu, against Tenji’s son. The victorious Tenmu (r. 672–86),
along with his consort and successor Jitō (r. 686–97), embarked on a far-
reaching transformation of the nascent state. Among the developments of
their reigns were the country name Japan (Nihon or Nippon), the title tennō
(Heavenly Sovereign or Emperor), written law codes, new systems of court
rank and title, an expanded and more powerful central bureaucracy, greater
state control over religion, and eventually a new Chinese-style capital city
(Fujiwara, established in 694). These new institutions were matched by
literary innovations. The great poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro and others
wrote soaring elegies and paeans to Tenmu, Jitō, and their princes that form
the core of the poetic canon established by the Man’yōshū. Sponsorship by
Tenmu and Jitō and their successors was responsible for the compilation of
the Nihon shoki, and, according to its preface, of the Kojiki. All of these works
were dedicated in their own way to the glorification – and at times even the

18
 Introduction: writing, literacy, and the origins of Japanese literature

deification – of the rulers who had established themselves as the first emper-
ors of Japan in the aftermath of the Jinshin War of 672.
In the early eighth century complete penal and administrative laws were
promulgated – the 701 Taihō code (revised in 757 as the Yōrō code) – and a
new capital city was established to the north of Fujiwara: the Heijō capital in
Nara, which with interruptions would remain the political center from 710
until 784. This was a period of great cultural dynamism, symbolized by the
construction of the enormous Tōdaiji temple at Nara and the country-wide
network of provincial temples (kokubunji) centered on it, and also by the
lavish art works and luxury products, many imported from Korea, China, and
the Silk Road, that are preserved in the Shōsōin depository. But the Nara
period was also marked by great political turmoil, with rebellions, conspira-
cies, and purges; there were also natural disasters like the great smallpox
epidemic of 735–7, which some scholars estimate killed as much as a third of
the population. This combination of brilliance and upheaval underlay the
literary production of the eighth century, including the composition of much
of the poetry collected in the Kaifūsō and Man’yōshū and also the compilation
of those anthologies themselves, the completion of the Kojiki and the Nihon
shoki, and the production of the fudoki gazetteers. All of these writings were
produced for the court, with official or unofficial sanction. More so than for
any subsequent era, the literature of ancient Japan is inseparably linked to its
political history.
The legitimacy of imperial rule by Tenmu’s and Jitō’s successors (their line
was supplanted in 770 with the accession of one of Tenji’s grandsons, but the
fundamental structures they established remained in place) was supported by
a mélange of symbols and rituals with complex origins. Similarly, early
Japanese poetry and prose drew on a wide range of sources, foreign and
domestic. But, as elsewhere in East Asia, the armature of this emergent
tradition was the literary Chinese canon. As reflected in the official university
curriculum outlined in the eighth-century administrative codes, the funda-
mental framework of learning and knowledge was provided by the Five
Classics and their commentaries: the Odes (shi), Documents (shu), Rites (li),
Changes (yi), and the Spring and Autumn Annals (chunqiu).
Early Japanese readers were also exposed to a surprisingly expansive corpus
of other works. The dynastic histories available in eighth-century Japan
included classics like the Shiji and Hanshu, and extended to those compiled
up to the early Tang. Allusions in works like the Nihon shoki, Kaifūsō, and
Man’yōshū, and scraps of text in wooden and paper documents, show that
poetry anthologies circulated widely. The most important was the Wenxuan (c.

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 david lurie

526–30), but collections of individual authors and less well-known anthologies

like the Yutai xinyong (c. 545) were also influential. It is also clear that early
Japanese elites consulted a range of Taoist writings and technical manuals of
medicine, warfare, architecture, engineering and so on, in addition to enor-
mous quantities of Buddhist sutras, treatises, and commentaries. But the most
important imported texts were the classified omnibus works, both textbooks
and references, that served as the primary entry point into the world of literary
Chinese writings. Many of the classical allusions (and borrowings) in works like
the Nihon shoki were taken secondhand from such sources, which included
classified encyclopedias (leishu) like the early Tang Yiwen leiju and Chuxue ji.
Dictionaries like the Shuowen jiezi (c. 100 CE) and Qieyun (601) were also widely
consulted; the most important of these seems to have been the extensive sixth-
century Yupian, which served as both a dictionary and an encyclopedia.
By the eighth century it is clear that many domestic compositions had joined
the foregoing imported texts. In addition to poetry anthologies like the
Man’yōshū and Kaifūsō and prose works like the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, these
included family histories and biographies, accounts of temples and shrines,
dictionaries and glossaries, and commentaries on Buddhist texts. The legal
codes that were compiled during the reigns of Tenmu and Jitō, and possibly as
early as that of Tenji, were accompanied by substantial commentaries, even as
they generated further legal material in the form of kyaku (ordinances) and shiki
(statutory elaborations). Early commentary on the codes survives only in later
collections, the Ryō no gige (833) and Ryō no shūge (late ninth/early tenth
century). Government documents of the eighth century, often straightfor-
wardly expressed ordinances and statues, but sometimes of sufficient length
and elaboration to be considered quasi-literary works, are collected in the 927
Engi shiki and in categorized references like the Ruijū sandai kyaku (eleventh
century) and Ruijū fusenshō (late eleventh/early twelfth century).
We have only indirect evidence of what types of writing were considered
most valuable in ancient Japan, but it is surely anachronistic to treat the prose
of the Kojiki and fudoki along with the poetry of the Man’yōshū and Kaifūsō as
literary while excluding royal proclamations and reports to the throne in
elaborate Chinese-style parallel prose. Nonetheless, the writings surveyed in
the following pages include some of the most brilliant and engaging in the
Japanese tradition, establishing precedents for and anticipating features of later
works of poetry and narrative prose in both Chinese and vernacular styles.
In a prewar lecture, the influential scholar Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953)
raised a fundamental issue of early Japanese literature when he said the
Hitachi no kuni fudoki was “a gazetteer of imported modishness [haikara na

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 Introduction: writing, literacy, and the origins of Japanese literature

fudoki]. That is, it gives the feeling of being thoroughly dominated by the
authority of the court. One could say it is the sort of work that has no dreams
at all – or rather, that if it does, they are dreams of China.” A subsequent
lecture expanded on this formulation: “To put this in contemporary terms,
the Hitachi no kuni fudoki was written by men of civilization [bunmeijin]
looking back at the world of the past, and therefore incorporates a cold,
indifferent attitude that is incapable of fully understanding that past.”1 The
use of words with Meiji resonances is deliberate, involving a parallel much
invoked by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals. Just as
the “civilization and enlightenment” discourse of the Meiji period strove to
leave behind traditional early modern culture, Orikuchi implies, the Sinicized
“civilization” of the eighth century was similarly opposed to a rich earlier
native culture. But this is a flawed analogy. While remnants of Edo period
culture were everywhere in evidence during the Meiji period, and indeed in
Orikuchi’s own day, the only traces of early Japanese literature are from
precisely this Sinicizing period. It is true that works like the Hitachi no kuni
fudoki or Nihon shoki, which rely on Chinese rhetoric and imagery, contrast
with “warmer,” apparently more “traditional” texts, such as the Kojiki or the
Izumo no kuni fudoki. But works of the latter type were in their own time just
as new-fangled and innovative as the more superficially Sinicized ones;
perhaps even more so, as they did not conform to the preexisting trans-
regional norm of Chinese-style writing.
Orikuchi limns a distinctive feature of the style and narratorial perspective
of the Hitachi no kuni fudoki. But we can accept this insight without the
baggage that has been loaded onto it. It seems unlikely that the authors and
readers of ancient Japan would have felt the need to choose between more
“modish” (if indeed that is what they were) Chinese-style writings and those
that, like the Kojiki, engineered new forms of distinctive local significance.
From the Man’yōshū to the Nihon shoki to the fudoki, eighth-century texts
demonstrate a delight in multiple accounts: variant narratives, alternate
attributions, differing local legends, and so on. The weighty authority of
the Nihon shoki, or the totalizing ambitions of the Kojiki, are an essential
feature of those works, but we should not allow the comparative scarcity of
surviving writing from this era to blind us to the fact that contemporary
readers would have experienced and appreciated them in the context of a
much wider world of diverse alternate accounts.

1
Orikuchi hakase kinen kodai kenkyūjo, eds., Orikuchi Shinobu zenshū nōto-hen, vol. 2
(Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1970), 215 and 231–2.

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 2
Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon
shoki, and related works
david lurie

The earliest extant works of the Japanese tradition date to the early eighth
century, during the first decade of the Nara capital. The Kojiki (Record of
Ancient Matters, 712) and Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720) are important
for their content – a mix of myth, legend, and history, interspersed with
poetry – and for the very different styles in which they were written. Their
influence and significance is apparent in the variety of other narratives
written about Japanese incidents and institutions in the remainder of the
Nara and the early Heian periods, and also in the long tradition of scholarship
and commentary they generated (devoted almost exclusively to the Nihon
shoki until the early modern period). Despite their overlaps, these works
differ profoundly in content, editorial stance, and written style. Especially in
their earlier sections they have often been treated as facets of a unified corpus
of Japanese myths that awaits reconstruction by scholars able to strip away
later accretions. Regardless of whether one endorses this project of reading
through them (and contemporary scholars are critical of such general notions
as “myths of Japan” [Nihon shinwa] or “[common] myths of the records and
chronicles” [kiki shinwa]), the first step in approaching the Kojiki and the
Nihon shoki must be analysis of the meaning of given narrative sequences
within each particular text.
It is true that similar stories about identical or related gods appear in these
works; and, conversely, that they weave together (sometimes quite loosely)
materials that must have originated in different contexts. Moreover, there are
connections with actual cults and rituals, from periods before and after the
eighth century as well as contemporaneously with the compilation of the
Kojiki and Nihon shoki. But oft-excerpted stories and scenes are deeply
embedded within the texts that contain them. More importantly, the essen-
tial qualities of these works lie in the distinctive tone and structure that they
impose on their sometimes shared materials, characteristics that are down-
played or ignored when they are simply treated as parts of a larger whole.

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 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

The Kojiki
The Kojiki is generally dated by its preface to 712 (Wadō 5), but independent
internal evidence confirms the likelihood of its composition around that time.
It is a collection of mythical, legendary, and quasi-historical material stretch-
ing from the appearance of the first gods in the High Heavenly Plain (taka-
ama no hara) to the reign of the female sovereign later known as Suiko (trad. r.
592–628 CE).1 It is divided into three books, the first of which describes an
early age of the gods, beginning with heaven and earth coming into existence,
narrating the creation of the earthly realm that would come to be ruled by the
sovereigns, and ending with accounts of the descent of Ninigi, the grandson
of the sun-goddess, to this “land amid reed planes,” and of the exploits of his
children and grandchildren. The second book portrays the origins of rule by
legendary sovereigns, starting with Ninigi’s great-grandson (later known as
Jinmu), and describes the expansion of their realm, following reign-by-reign
until that of the fifteenth legendary ruler, Ōjin. The third book continues
from the famously virtuous sixteenth ruler, Nintoku, to Suiko, whose reign,
implicitly here and explicitly in the Nihon shoki, represented the beginning of
a new era for eighth-century historians.
For contemporary students of Japanese literature, the Kojiki is the source of
familiar narratives describing trips to other realms like the world of the dead
or an undersea palace, journeys of conquest by early sovereigns and their
relatives, and vivid tales of love and jealousy involving both gods and
humans. Its three books contain 112 vernacular poems (uta) and numerous
genealogical notes about the descent of the sovereigns and the backgrounds
of prominent lineage groups and organizations. The genealogies tie the work
to the political and social circumstances of the early eighth century, but they
also animate much of the narrative material. As in other early prose works,
narratives often serve to justify or explain a particular genealogical notation,
and in many cases a given narrative cannot be understood without reference
to the lineages that are involved.
The first of the three books is devoted to the origins of the realm of Japan
and of the sovereigns who rule it: it links various localities, and the gods and
influential lineages associated with them, to an overall narrative of creation in
stages. Beginning with the first appearance of heaven and earth and the

1
The familiar Sino-Japanese names of the sovereigns (Jinmu, Yūryaku, Suiko, etc.) were
created in the mid eighth century, and originally appeared in neither the Kojiki nor the
Nihon shoki, where rulers are identified either by vernacular names (e.g. Kamu Yamato
Iwarebiko) or by the location of their palace.

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spontaneous generation of a number of deities, single and in male/female

pairs, it turns to the exploits of the last of these gods to appear: Izanaki
(probably, “man who invites”) and Izanami (“woman who invites”).2 As
ordered by the elder heavenly deities, these two gods descend to earth and
procreate, giving birth to the islands of the Japanese archipelago and to a
series of deities associated with geographic features and natural phenomena.
Izanami dies from burns incurred while delivering a fire deity, who is then
killed by Izanaki, while other gods are born from her bodily fluids and from
the spattered blood and corpse of the fire deity.
Izanaki travels to the land of Yomi (an afterworld) in search of his dead
wife, but flees in horror after witnessing her rotting corpse; she angrily
pursues him to the border of Yomi, where they sever their relations.
Purifying himself after his return, Izanaki generates another slew of deities,
the last three of which are Amaterasu (“shining in heaven”), Tsukuyomi
(“moon-counter”), and Susano’o (“raging male”). They are ordered by their
progenitor to rule, respectively, the heavens, the night, and the sea, but
Susano’o is expelled by Izanaki after refusing to obey. When a farewell visit to
his sister Amaterasu is met with suspicion, he attempts to prove his sincerity
through a test in which they each generate offspring from articles obtained
from the other. This results in another series of new deities, and after
claiming victory Susano’o rages through heaven, driving Amaterasu to cast
both heaven and earth into darkness by withdrawing into a rock chamber,
from which she is induced to emerge by a committee of gods who arrange a
spectacle including lewd dancing and laughter.
Punished and cast out of heaven, Susano’o alights in the land of Izumo,
saves the daughter of a local deity by killing an enormous serpent with eight
heads and tails, and settles down in a palace. His sixth-generation descendant,
Ōkuninushi (“great lord of the land”), is twice killed by rivalrous brother
deities and revived, and then travels to Susano’o’s realm, where he undergoes
trials while wooing his daughter. Stealing magical articles from Susano’o, and
ultimately gaining his blessing, he subdues his brothers and continues the
creation of the land with other deities.
Amaterasu determines that the land is to be ruled by one of the gods that
she produced during her contest with Susano’o, but the land is too chaotic for

2
Deity names in the Kojiki and other early works seem to have originally been semanti-
cally transparent, but many of them have been obscured by linguistic change, by
interference from the meanings of characters used phonographically, or simply by the
passage of time. For many there is consensus about their significance, but others are
subject to dispute, and some lack even a convincing proposed interpretation.

24
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

him to descend from heaven. After two failed attempts, an emissary deity
travels to Izumo and convinces Ōkuninushi and his sons to yield the land to
Amaterasu’s offspring. Her grandson Ninigi (“fertile abundance”) then des-
cends to Hyūga (in eastern Kyushu), where he marries the daughter of a
mountain god, and where his son and grandson marry daughters of the sea
god. Ninigi’s great-grandson Kamu Yamato Iwarebiko (“fine lad of Iware in
divine Yamato”), later known as Jinmu, is the first of the human rulers
followed by the rest of the work, and the beginning of a royal genealogy
leading down to the present day of the Kojiki.
Jinmu is the starting point for the second and third books, which follow
sovereigns chronologically from reign to reign, with occasional interpola-
tions of (usually mythic) material that provides genealogical background.
These accounts of the age of human rulers are loosely organized into sections
for successive sovereigns, tied together by a generally consistent format:
statements of parentage, consorts, and offspring at the outset, and of tomb
location at the conclusion of the account of each reign. (Such statements are
the sole content of the final portion of the third book.)
Book Two presents the expansion and solidification of the realm of the
sovereigns through conquest and religious authority. It begins with an
account of Jinmu’s journey eastward from Kyushu, alternately fighting
with and relying on local gods and various human and non-human creatures,
until he successfully establishes his palace at Kashiwara (in the southern Nara
basin). After a mysterious series of eight “sovereigns” with only genealogical
information, Jinmu’s descendant Sujin and Sujin’s son Suinin are portrayed as
expanding the religious role of the sovereigns, ending an epidemic through
worship of the deity of Mount Miwa (Ōmononushi) and averting a curse by
refurbishing the Izumo shrine. The Suinin section contains a particularly
interesting cluster of narratives, including the tragedy of the consort Saobime
and her incestuous relationship with her rebellious brother, the tale of a
cursed prince who grows to manhood without speaking, and a journey to the
world of eternal life in search of the mythic tachibana fruit. Perhaps the
centerpiece of this entire book is the extended narrative of Yamato Takeru,
a prince who journeys to Kyushu, Izumo, and northeastern Honshū on
missions of conquest for his father. This vivid cycle of stories, which includes
some of the best-known “songs” of the Kojiki, ends with the dead prince
changed into a white bird that flies away, fruitlessly pursued by his bereaved
wives and children. The second book concludes with the famous story of
Jingū, consort to a sovereign destroyed by gods for ignoring their oracle, who
in her husband’s stead leads a mission of conquest to Korea, followed by the

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reign of her son Ōjin, marked by the arrival of immigrant experts in such
technologies as weaving, writing, and brewing. This complements Yamato
Takeru’s journeys of conquest by showing (fictitiously, of course) the expan-
sion of royal authority to the Korean peninsula (the Kojiki makes only passing
reference to Korea thereafter, and never mentions China at all).
Book Three contains considerably less narrative material. For the conclud-
ing nine sovereigns (who correspond roughly to the period from the end of
the fifth through the beginning of the seventh century), only a skeletal
account of genealogy, palaces, and tombs is provided, and the bulk of this
book is devoted to accounts of only two sovereigns. Nintoku (Ōjin’s son) is
portrayed as a benevolent sage-king (in the most clearly Confucian portion of
the work), but also as a romantic hero who struggles with his jealous consort
Iwanohime, producing a vivid sequence of “songs.” Yūryaku (Nintoku’s
grandson) is portrayed as brutally violent, but primarily through his actions
before his enthronement; his reign is a series of largely auspicious episodes,
several of which show him as a lover in pursuit of his female subjects.
Between Nintoku and Yūryaku is a bloody interval of succession disputes,
in which several occupants of and contenders for the throne are brutally
murdered; after Yūryaku’s reign is a final narrative sequence involving the
accession of two royal princes, Ninken and Kenzō, who had fled the earlier
violence.
The written style of the Kojiki has often been described, incorrectly, as a
blend of Chinese and Japanese, a formulation that confuses orthographic
variety with linguistic difference. Portions of the work are written in phono-
graphs, or in a mixture of phonographs and logographs, or entirely in
logographs (sometimes arranged consistently with literary Chinese usage)
but the kundoku reading process ensures a degree of linguistic homogeneity
inconsistent with the idea of a mixture of languages. In many respects this
prose style is close to the everyday logographic writing used in paper and
wooden documents from the late seventh and eighth centuries, but great
pains have been taken to systematize its orthography to make it as clear as
possible. In this process, orally transmitted myths functioned only as raw
material, and cannot be recovered in an “original” form. The language of the
Kojiki also is surely related to what was spoken before the advent of writing,
but the work provides no direct access to that “original” language, even
though its preface claims that it does.
Because the Kojiki makes no appearance in the official historical record of
the Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan Continued, 797), some scholars have
doubted the authenticity of that preface, which is signed by a middle-ranking

26
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

courtier named Ō no Yasumaro (?–723). A small minority have even argued

that the entire text is a later forgery, but the language reflected by its
phonograph orthography establishes it as an early eighth-century work,
and the weight of the evidence suggests that the preface is also genuine. In
style and worldview, though, it departs radically from the main text of the
Kojiki. Yasumaro tells an elaborate tale of multigenerational sponsorship by
Tenmu and his niece (Tenji’s daughter) Genmei (r. 707–15), linked by a much-
debated claim that a mysterious court attendant named Hieda no Are some-
how underwrote the linguistic authenticity of the work through “reciting and
learning” earlier historical records. Once this connection to ancient narratives
has been made, the preface turns to a description of the style engineered for
the prose of the main text:
In high antiquity words and meanings were both forthright; it is very hard to
put them in writing by unfolding sentences and constructing phrases. If one
compiles them completely in accordance with the readings of the characters,
the words do not extend to the meaning; if one strings them together totally
relying on the sounds of the characters, the impression of the passage
becomes very long. Herewith, at present, I sometimes used both sounds
and readings within a single phrase; I sometimes recorded only with readings
inside a single passage. Thus, when the logic of the words was hard to see, I
clarified it with notes; when the form of the meaning was easy to understand,
I did not annotate at all.
A common interpretation of this passage, grounded in a misreading of its
links between language and writing, is that Yasumaro had to avoid “writing
in Chinese” to preserve the “native” Japanese language. But the kundoku
reading process meant that Chinese-style texts were not necessarily “in” that
language, and careful analysis of the wording here shows that the salient
contrast is not between the Chinese and Japanese languages, but rather
between the orthodox transregional mode of formal Chinese-style writing
(employed in works like the Nihon shoki) and the vernacular style of the Kojiki
with its purported connection to “ancient language.”
It is possible that the distinctive style of the main text was motivated not
simply because recording “old language” necessitated avoiding the Chinese
style, but also because, conversely, avoiding the associations of that style
necessitated a new method of writing, which Yasumaro justifies by claiming
it was both based on “recitations” and necessary to be faithful to them. The
preface itself is evidence of the influences he wanted to avoid: written in
elaborate Chinese-style parallel prose, with phrases of four and six characters,
it is also packed with borrowings from and references to a range of classical

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 david lurie

Chinese texts. Although it is contradicted by the preface, the main text

envisions a form of rulership whose authority is presented in oral terms.
This corresponds stylistically with the creation of a vernacular text minimally
dependent on Chinese rhetoric and related visions of statecraft. Just as the
actual relation of the early Japanese state and its ideology to Sinitic models is a
separate matter from its self-presentation, so with the style of the Kojiki the
important point is that it attempts to engineer a new vernacular mode of
expression that does not visibly derive from the transregional formal standard.
On the surface, the result is a lucid and effective style that is clearly not
literary Chinese, but in actuality it is still dependent on the Chinese com-
mentarial and lexicographical tradition to distinguish fine shades of meaning,
and throughout it relies on Chinese grammatical markers to connect and
separate phrases and clauses.
Contemporary readers – there do not seem to have been that many, at
least as compared to the Nihon shoki – must have experienced the work that
resulted from these strenuous efforts as a remarkably creative and entertain-
ing tour de force. The Kojiki pulls together disparate traditional stories and a
welter of genealogies, human and divine, melding them into a single unified
narrative that runs, with considerable energy, from the origins of heaven and
earth through to the final episodes of the enthronement of the refugee
princes. The preface suggests the seriousness of this endeavor, claiming
royal sponsorship and trumpeting an ambition to correct and preserve
corrupted and vanishing traditions. The main body of the work can be seen
as conforming to such a project, but it is also a highly entertaining collection
of stories and songs that are made all the more meaningful by the care with
which they have been incorporated into the larger narrative whole.

The Nihon shoki

Completed in 720, only eight years after the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki both
overlaps with and departs from the earlier work (not least because it is clearly
the product of a decades-long process involving multiple compilers, and
probably multiple teams of compilers). It is about four times longer, and
more forthright in its treatment of its sources, citing a number of them
directly. It also covers a longer period, becoming more detailed just as the
Kojiki peters out into a skeletal list of reigns, and devoting the largest
proportion of its historical narrative to the decades following the end of
that list (essentially, the seventh century). Most prominently, where the style
of the Kojiki rejects overt Sinitic norms, the Nihon shoki explicitly adheres to

28
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

them: excepting the phonographic “songs,” it is written in a logographic style

consistent with literary Chinese usage and orthography, and some passages
are even cribbed directly from Chinese classics. The result is not as distinctive
as the Kojiki, and there is no denying the dryness of many of the annals,
especially in its latter half, but much of the Nihon shoki is of considerable
literary interest. Many of the songs it contains do not overlap with those of
the Kojiki, and those that do are sometimes given different meanings by their
prose settings; there are set pieces of soaring Sinitic rhetoric, often put into
the mouths of sovereigns, princes, and their courtiers; and independent
narrative episodes from the court, the countryside, and abroad are frequently
incorporated into the annals. Even passages in the more “historical” sections
are often written with flair, such as the depiction of the assassination of Soga
no Iruka in 645, which is a small masterpiece of suspense.
The Nihon shoki still provides historians, even today, with a fundamental
chronology of events in early Japan, especially for the seventh century. Its
authority over the nearly thirteen centuries since its composition stemmed in
part from its use of the rhetorical devices and narrative structures of the
Chinese official dynastic histories whose tradition began with the Shiji
(Records of the Historian, c. 100 BCE) and solidified with the Hanshu
(History of the Former Han, 111) and Hou Hanshu (History of the Later
Han, c. fifth century). The title itself announces this affiliation, while simul-
taneously implying a departure from the Chinese model. Where the Kojiki is
a comparatively neutral “Record of Ancient Matters,” the Nihon shoki is
explicitly linked to the new state name “Japan” (Nihon) – less than half a
century old in 720 – and also to the traditional format of the Chinese dynastic
histories. By analogy, the title can be interpreted as “annals 紀 of the history
書 of Japan 日本.” This implies continuity with Chinese models of statecraft
and official historiography, but also contrast with the rhythm of dynastic rise
and fall that drove the compilation of Chinese histories and provided their
moral and temporal armature, because the object here is not a particular
dynasty but “Japan” itself, from the beginning of the cosmos to the abdication
of Jitō in the eleventh year of her reign (697).
Whether Nihon shoki is the original title or a very early alternate is not
clear: all manuscripts use that title, which appears in some eighth-century
sources, but other early references (such as the entry on the work’s comple-
tion in the Shoku Nihongi) use the abbreviated title Nihongi. Regardless, the
emulation of and departure from Chinese models embedded in these titles is
replicated on multiple levels, so that, for example, legendary and quasi-
legendary sovereigns are evaluated in Confucian terms even as the overall

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 david lurie

chronology of reigns denies the interruptions of succession guaranteed by the

notion of a “mandate of heaven.” (Nonetheless, historians reading between
the lines argue for a number of such interruptions.)
The first two volumes of the Nihon shoki, commonly referred to as the
“God Age Volumes” (jindaikan or jindai no maki), tell of the beginning of
the cosmos, the appearance of gods, the creation of the islands of Japan, and
the descent to them of Ninigi, who is here the grandson of the god
Takamimusuhi (“Lofty Divine Creative Power”) as well as Amaterasu. This
narrative is interrupted by fifty-eight variant accounts introduced by the
formula “a certain book says” (一書曰), clustered so as to divide the main
narrative into eleven sections. These variant accounts range from brief
notations of alternate deity names to extended stories quite unlike those of
the main narrative. The contradictions among these variants have provided a
rich lode of material, not only for modern scholars, but for premodern
commentators and authors. One of the keys to the continued development
of Japanese mythology is the permeability of this portion of the Nihon shoki,
which in its open structure seems amenable to endless expansion and trans-
formation. Nonetheless, it is essential to note that the variants are clearly
subordinated to the main narrative, which continues unbroken across the
interruptions.
In addition to such clear differences of format, the first book of the Kojiki
and the first two books of the Nihon shoki also diverge fundamentally in their
content and cosmology. This is immediately apparent from their respective
openings: where the Kojiki begins with the first appearance of heaven and
earth, with no explanation of their origins, the Nihon shoki cribs from a series
of Chinese sources to present an elaborate yin-yang-based origin narrative for
the universe. (Similarly, the subsequent appearance of early gods in the Kojiki
is presented as a kind of spontaneous generation, where the Nihon shoki
continues to explain their emergence in terms of the interaction of specific
cosmic forces.) In the subsequent myths, perhaps the most striking difference
is that the long Kojiki sequence devoted to the Ōkuninushi saga (and strongly
associated with Izumo) is entirely absent from the Nihon shoki, where he
appears only to yield the land before Ninigi’s descent. Another prominent
divergence is that in the main narrative of the Nihon shoki Izanami does not
die and Izanaki does not journey to Yomi (although there is a variant version
of this story). Unlike the Kojiki portrayal of Izanaki generating gods on his
own after returning from Yomi, in the Nihon shoki he and Izanami give birth
to Susano’o and Amaterasu together, in keeping with the governing yin-yang
cosmology. A catalog of such differences could continue at length, but here it

30
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

will suffice to note, finally, how the fundamental divide between the mythol-
ogy of these two works is symbolized by the fact that the Kojiki does not use
the term “Japan” (Nihon) anywhere, whereas the main narrative of the Nihon
shoki omits the Kojiki’s fundamental term for the heavenly realm (taka-ama no
hara).
From its third volume, which concerns the reign of the sovereign later
known as Jinmu, the format of the Nihon shoki changes into temporally
ordered annals organized by year of reign (keyed to the Chinese sixty-year
cycle of stems and branches, and thus tied down to an absolute, trans-regional
chronology), and including entries for given months and days. Brief variant
accounts still appear occasionally, but not with the frequency and amplitude
that are hallmarks of the God Age volumes. Each sovereign between Jinmu
and Jitō (the fortieth by the Nihon shoki’s count) has his or her own annal,
with a standard format beginning with a description of the sovereign’s
character and genealogy, a narrative of circumstances preceding enthrone-
ment, and a list of consorts and offspring. After the subsequent year-, month-,
and day-ordered annal of the sovereign’s reign, there is a concluding notation
of the location of the royal tomb.
Here as well the contrast with the Kojiki is striking. Although the two share
the same fundamental royal genealogy, they emphasize different aspects of
the reigns of these human rulers. As its annals enter the sixth century, the
Nihon shoki becomes progressively more concerned with relations between
the Yamato court (anachronistically portrayed) and Korean and Chinese
rulers. Increasingly detailed entries narrate exchanges with Silla, Paekche,
and Koguryŏ (including a description of what the compilers portray as a
Japanese sphere of influence, “Mimana,” in the south of the peninsula), the
arrival of Buddhism, embassies to the Sui court, the rise of the powerful Soga
lineage group, the enlightened reign of Suiko and her nephew Prince
Shōtoku (trad. 574–622), and so on. This culminates in the dynamic and
immensely detailed depiction of the rise of the ruler later known as Tenji
and the late seventh-century reign of his brother Tenmu (succeeded by
Tenmu’s consort Jitō). All of this material needs to be evaluated critically,
as even the seventh-century portions contain much elaboration and exag-
geration. Nonetheless, the eighth-century reader of the Nihon shoki would
have sensed its annals reaching almost to the present day as it concluded with
Jitō’s abdication in 697, a mere generation before the work’s completion.
The Kojiki, on the other hand, concludes its narrative portion with the
story of the rulers later known as Ninken and Kenzō (traditionally taken to
have reigned in the late fifth century). It does continue on to Suiko (whose

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reign clearly marked an epoch for Yasumaro and other eighth-century

historians), but these sections are skeletal royal genealogies without narrative
content. Where the Nihon shoki presents “Japan” as historically unfolding in a
continual process implicitly extending from the age of the gods up to the
present, the Kojiki portrays antiquity as discontinuous with the time of the
work’s composition (in its main text; the worldview of the preface is in many
respects closer to that of the Nihon shoki).
Where the Kojiki has a preface but lacks any references in the official
history, the Nihon shoki lacks a preface but has a clear, though not unproble-
matic, description of its completion in the Shoku Nihongi, the later eighth-
century work that covers the years 697–791. The annal for 720 (Yōrō 4/5/21)
includes the following entry:
Earlier, Prince Toneri (first royal rank) had received a royal order to compile
the Nihongi [Annals of Japan]. Now, he had achieved success, and submitted
it to the throne. There were thirty volumes of annals and one volume of
genealogical tables.3
This entry refers to the final stage of what must have been a long compilation
process, involving several groups of scholars (some of Chinese or Korean
origin) and originating with history-editing initiatives ordered by Tenmu that
are referred to in the Kojiki preface and the Nihon shoki itself. In the absence of
a preface, it provides the most immediate framework for situating the Nihon
shoki – a framework that is part of the continued state enterprise of compiling
the Shoku Nihongi and the four other works that, along with the Nihon shoki,
are collectively termed the Six National Histories (Rikkokushi).4 These works,
the promulgation of which spans the nearly two centuries between 720 and
the beginning of the tenth century, implicitly endorse the Nihon shoki’s
project to link antiquity to the present realm by continuing its annalistic
record, unbroken all the way back to Jinmu.
Until the eighteenth century, the Nihon shoki overshadowed the Kojiki
almost completely. Along with other texts, the Kojiki was simply an adjunct
to the work of reading and interpreting the Nihon shoki, especially the initial
“God Age” volumes, as it quickly became the object of veneration and
intense scholarly interest. Official lectures on it were held at the Heian
court on multiple occasions from the early ninth through the mid tenth

3
Prince Toneri, an elder statesman who was almost certainly a figurehead rather than an
active compiler, was one of the most influential sons of Tenmu and a prominent figure in
early Nara period politics.
4
The four histories that follow the 797 Shoku Nihongi are the 840 Nihon kōki, the 866 Shoku
Nihon kōki, the 879 Nihon Montoku tennō jitsuroku, and the 901 Nihon sandai jitsuroku.

32
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

centuries, and there is some evidence of scholarly discussion already in the

eighth century. (There are several extant “personal records” [shiki] of these
lectures, which include notes on readings of key terms and dialogues on
questions of interpretation.) The most important resource for the study of
the Heian engagement with the Nihon shoki is the Shaku Nihongi, compiled by
Urabe Kanekata (fl. late thirteenth century). Based on lectures given in 1274
and 1275 by his father Kanefumi (fl. mid thirteenth century), this is a giant
compilation of earlier scholarship and commentary. At the center of this
enterprise was the establishment of correct kundoku readings for the entire
work, a continuation of the basic approach sketched out by reading notes in
the text of the Nihon shoki itself.
Simultaneous with this official scholarly engagement was the emergence
of a ramifying discourse that has in recent years come to be known as the
“medieval Chronicles of Japan” (chūsei Nihongi). From the late Heian period
onward, Buddhist and Indian deities and abstract concepts merged with new
political and religious institutions and local and popular cults to create a
complex network of narrative material associated with, but not included in,
the Nihon shoki, and incorporated into commentaries, story collections,
treatises, and origin narratives for shrines and temples. This is perhaps the
most important component of the reception of early Japanese prose works
before the nativist philology (Kokugaku) of the early modern period.

Literature of report and proclamation

Two corpuses of material from the late eighth and early tenth century form
the core of what some mid twentieth-century scholars termed a “literature of
report and proclamation” (sōsen no bungaku).5 This refers primarily to the
vernacular proclamations (senmyō) of the 797 Shoku Nihongi and the prayers or
liturgies (norito) collected in the 927 Engi shiki (a collection of official protocols
for governance and ritual), although other texts contain additional examples
of these genres. Despite the long interval between these two works, there are
remarkable similarities in the language and rhetoric of the senmyō and
norito – and, notably, in their orthography: both are inscribed in a mix of
logographs and phonographs, similar in principle to modern Japanese inscrip-
tion, that modern scholars often call “proclamation style” (senmyō-gaki).

5
The term was coined by Andō Masatsugu (1878–1952) and adopted by Kurano Kenji
(1902–91).

33
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The Shoku Nihongi contains sixty-two senmyō in the standard division,

spanning the ninety-two years between 697 and 789. These were vernacular
proclamations read out loud at court by designated officials, in the voice of
the sovereign, on such occasions as New Year’s celebrations, enthronements,
and promulgation of new era names. (Numerous other edicts are quoted in
the Shoku Nihongi, but they are in the formal literary Chinese style, as are all
of the edicts of the Nihon shoki.) Despite the careful notation of the senmyō,
which is connected to their public vocal performance, their language and
rhetoric are far from primeval orality, as they employ many structures and
locutions derived from literary Chinese writings mediated through kundoku.
Much like the prose of the Kojiki, these vernacular proclamations aim for a
text that can be convincingly vocalized rather than for the reproduction of
preexisting orality in writing. They are attempts to assert royal authority
through the voice – that is, through the projection of the body or presence of
the sovereign, delegated by means of the text itself to an official reader-
surrogate.
The eighth book (out of fifty) of the Engi shiki contains twenty-seven
norito texts, which form both the oldest extant examples of the genre and
its classical core. These liturgies are traditionally divided into those that were
intoned, from on high, to worshipers, which like the senmyō are associated
with the verb noru (“proclaim”); and those that were offered up as a kind of
report or supplication to the gods, which use the verb mōsu (“state humbly”).
These norito seem to have taken form in the context of mostly state-
sponsored rituals from the late seventh century onward, although it is
important to bear in mind the Heian period provenance of the Engi shiki
texts themselves. With significant parallels with (and contrasts to) the differ-
ent mythic accounts in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and other early works, and
with vivid imagery and extended parallel phrasing, the norito are of more
literary interest than the senmyō. Taken together these two genres provide
an intriguing picture of an early tradition of text-based vocal performance
that is likely to have influenced the style of other prose works of the period, in
particular the Kojiki.

Clan histories
It is striking how firmly the surviving literary works of the eighth century are
linked to political institutions and state ideology. This is clear from their
structure and contents, but also from their paratexts: the preface to the Kojiki
and the Shoku Nihongi entry on the promulgation of the Nihon shoki, and also

34
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

the 713 government order that called the fudoki gazetteers into being. At the
time of their composition and initial circulation, these gazetteers were simply
bureaucratic reports (ge) submitted to the central government by provincial
governors’ offices. Their original format thus foregrounded the relationship
with the state for which they were composed, but a similar posture is
apparent in the preface to the Kojiki, which is also labeled as a formal report
to the throne: a memorial (hyō).
This hierarchical relationship with the state continues to be the context for
a cluster of works on history and mythology, compiled from the late eighth
century onward, which distinctively reworked the material of the Kojiki and
Nihon shoki. The traditional genre term for such works is ujibumi, “lineage
group documents,” or more loosely, “clan histories.” The term appears in the
title of the 789 Takahashi ujibumi (Account of the Takahashi Lineage Group),
a no-longer-extant work known from extensive quoted passages in the mid-
Heian Honchō gatsuryō and the eleventh-century Seiji yōryaku. These frag-
ments include accounts of the origin of the Takahashi, their service as
stewards at court, and their involvement in a long-running dispute over
official prerogatives, which seems to have motivated the composition of
the work. This is reminiscent of the best-known clan history, the Kogo shūi
(Gleanings from Ancient Stories) of 807. Submitted to the court by Inbe no
Hironari (fl. early ninth century), this fascinating work provides a history of
the Inbe, traditional rivals of the Nakatomi as specialists in court ceremony
and ritual, at a time when their fortunes were in decline. It includes a
narrative of court ritual since the creation of heaven and earth, foregrounding
the role of the Inbe, and ends with a list of contemporary practices that
Hironari saw as shameful departures from tradition and a warning of dire
consequences of improperly worshiping the gods. The Kogo shūi contains
much mythical and quasi-historical material that supplements or contradicts
accounts found in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and can be seen as a sustained
attempt to shape the diverse and contradictory “histories” those works
narrate into a unified account for the benefit of a particular lineage.
Other major clan histories include the 830 Shinsen kisōki (Newly Selected
Record of Scapulamancy), a treatise on the origins and techniques of turtle-
shell divination and the history of the Urabe, who claimed scapulamancy as
their traditional vocation; surviving incompletely, and argued by some to be
a medieval forgery, it includes early quotations from the Kojiki and accounts
of Urabe traditions. The Sumiyoshi taisha jindaiki (Record of the Age of the
Gods of the Great Sumiyoshi Shrine) appears to be a 789 revision of a 731
report to the Council on Deity Affairs (Jingikan) but may actually date from

35
 david lurie

the Heian period. It explains the deities and origins of the Sumiyoshi shrine in
Settsu province (modern Osaka) and lists its treasures, lands, and other
possessions. Long quotations from the Nihon shoki and material resembling
the Kojiki are included, while other parts of the text appear to be derived from
norito and no-longer extant gazetteers. It also contains unique material in the
form of stories (several noted for their literary distinction), genealogies, and
geographical information, much of it stemming from traditions of lineages
associated with the shrine.
A work that resembles a clan history in many respects, and which became
an essential source for medieval mythic discourse, is the Sendai kuji hongi
(Ancient Matters and Fundamental Records of Early Ages). It includes a
preface that unconvincingly claims it was written by Soga no Umako
(?–626) at the behest of Prince Shōtoku, but this attribution is no longer
accepted. The work is generally thought to have been compiled in the mid
ninth century by a member of the Mononobe lineage group, although some
scholars have argued for an earlier provenance. Written to rework mythol-
ogy much as the Kogo shūi does, it provides a history of Japan in eleven
“fundamental records” (hongi). The former half includes myths of the “Age of
the Gods” and the latter consists of annalistic accounts of reigns from Jinmu
through Suiko, concluding with a list of the origins of provincial chieftains
(kuni no miyatsuko), officially recognized local leaders of 144 districts. Much of
this overlaps with, or incorporates material from, the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and
Kogo shūi, but some of the divine and human genealogical material and the
information on provincial chieftains are original to this work, and in some
cases seem to be derived from significantly earlier sources. There are signs
that the Sendai kuji hongi was connected to the intellectual activity surround-
ing the early Heian lectures on the Nihon shoki.
The clan histories assert hereditary rights grounded in variant myths that
depart in significant respects from the official version included in the Nihon
shoki. They were produced at a time of early Heian emphasis on Chinese-
style meritocracy, and, more importantly, of efforts by Kanmu (r. 781–806)
and his immediate successors to exert more direct control over the state
through sponsorship of outsider lineages and institutions. In terms of their
specific mythic content, these works build on the accounts in the Nihon shoki
(and to a lesser extent the Kojiki), adding new material to them, but they also
share with the Kojiki and the fudoki a striking quality of enunciation and
directionality: they are written performances addressed to the throne and
often associated with particular authors. Despite the richly written quality of
all of these works (which is distinct from the attempts of several of them to

36
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

reproduce an oral effect), they are modeled on the vocal performance of court
officials making formal reports to the sovereign.
With its official status and Sinitic textual authority the Nihon shoki would
seem to be an exception, but it is significant that the Shoku Nihongi description
of its completion associates it with both a single author (Prince Toneri) and
an act of formal submission to the throne. Moreover, the Nihon shoki court
lectures, which may have begun already in the eighth century but which had
their heyday at the height of the clan histories, incorporated it into a different
kind of formal performative address at court, and also, eventually, associated
it with the “private” prerogatives of particular lineages that became specia-
lists on the work and its interpretation.

Buddhist writings
The influence of Buddhism on early Japanese literature can be considered in
both explicit and implicit terms. A major distinction between the Kojiki and
the Nihon shoki is that the former envisions a non-Buddhist antiquity – its
narrative material ends in the late fifth century in part because were it to
continue beyond that it would become impossible to avoid the impact of the
new religion on elite culture and politics – while the latter dwells extensively
on the origins of Buddhism and its expansion (portrayed as a matter of royal
sponsorship from the beginning). Thus the Nihon shoki makes extensive
reference to Buddhist texts and ceremonies, and in places even adapts
passages from sutras. But scholars have shown how extensively the Kojiki
relies on stylistic precedents from Buddhist texts, both in the phonographs
used for its “songs” and in the innovative logographic style used for its prose
passages. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the history of Japanese
religion, surface rejection of Buddhism coincides with deeper, more funda-
mental continuities.
Even if only in explicit terms, Buddhist writings play an enormous role in
early prose literature. The bulk of surviving written material from ancient
Japan is Buddhist – sutras, commentaries, treatises, and records related to
their copying in official scriptoria – and even though allowances have to be
made for differing rates of destruction of secular and sacred texts, there is no
doubt that imported Buddhist writings circulated widely from the seventh
century onward. The traditional assumption that Prince Shōtoku inaugu-
rated extensive involvement with, and domestic composition of, Buddhist
texts has been largely undermined by recent scholarship. It is clear that from
the late seventh century he was strongly associated with writing and literacy,

37
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but the texts that have traditionally been attributed to him are much more
likely to have been imported from China or Korea or composed by later
authors. Nonetheless, Shōtoku is an essential figure for literary history
because of the number of early Japanese works that were devoted to his
life, or anachronistically attributed to him.
A major early biography is the Shichidaiki (Record of Seven Lifetimes), an
eighth-century account of Shōtoku’s life known through quoted fragments in
later biographies, and thought to be identical to an Edo period manuscript
entitled Jōgū taishi den (Biography of the Upper Palace Prince [Shōtoku]). The
thirteenth-century Shōtoku taishiden shiki (Private Annotation of the
Biography of Prince Shōtoku) states that the Shichidaiki was written in 771
by a priest named Kyōmei. It discusses the six previous lives of Shōtoku, with
particular attention to his putative incarnation as the Chinese Tiantai patri-
arch Huisi (515–77), and narrates his accomplishments after his final rebirth in
Japan, relying heavily on the Nihon shoki account. Another early Shōtoku
biography is the Jōgū Shōtoku hō-ō teisetsu (Imperial Explanation of the
Dharma Prince Sagely Virtue [Shōtoku] of the Upper Palace), a haphazard
collection of information about early Japanese Buddhism, the genealogy and
accomplishments of Shōtoku and sovereigns associated with him, and
inscriptions and poetry connected to the temple of Hōryūji. Some of this
material seems to date back to the seventh century; the remainder is later,
mainly from the eighth century, and the text as a whole is thought to have
taken its current form in the tenth or early eleventh century. These biogra-
phies, and later works on the prince like the early Heian Jōgū Shōtoku taishiden
hoketsuki (Record to Supplement the Biography of Prince Shōtoku), culmi-
nate in the tenth century Shōtoku taishi denryaku (Chronicle Biography of
Prince Shōtoku), a compendious narrative of miraculous incidents that was
widely read and exerted much influence on visual culture and on later
writings, including collections of tale literature (setsuwa).6
Another important category of Buddhist writing is the record of
temple origins, or engi, a long-lived genre that would come to be a
major source of narrative material in the Heian and medieval periods.
Like many other early prose texts, engi have a complex relationship to
the Nihon shoki, the later sections of which were clearly based in part on
such temple records, although influence could also flow in the other

6
Other early biographies include the mid eighth-century Tōshi kaden, which collects
accounts of three prominent Fujiwara, and the Tō daiwajō tōseiden (779), a narrative of
the life of Ganjin (Ch. Jianzhen), the blind Chinese founder of the Tōshōdaiji temple in
Nara.

38
 Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related works

direction. A number of engi survive, complete or in part, from the

eighth century, including one for Hōryūji, but perhaps the most promi-
nent is the origin narrative for the Soga temple Asukadera: the Gangōji
garan engi narabi ni ruki shizaichō (Origins of Gangōji, along with a
Catalogue of its Possessions), which is excerpted in a late Heian com-
pendium of temple histories. This contains a history of early Buddhism
that parallels, and in significant ways departs from, that found in the
Nihon shoki; it also collects the texts of inscriptions associated with the
temple and an abridged list of its land holdings and other possessions.
Although the Nihon shoki and the Gangōji engi contain much vivid
narrative material, perhaps the most important – and certainly the most
entertaining – early Japanese work of Buddhist literature is the Nihon ryōiki
(Miraculous Tales of Japan), a collection of 116 tales compiled in three
volumes (each with a preface) by a priest named Kyōkai (also Keikai)
around the turn of the ninth century. Many of the stories are derived from
material adapted from Chinese sources, such as the Tang period collection
Mingbaoji, but the work also includes narratives that appear to have been
collected in Japan. Morals for stories and interpretive comments refer to a
range of secular and, especially, scriptural sources, most prominently the
Lotus Sutra, although in many cases these appear to be drawn not from
the original texts but from compilations of excerpts. The concerns of the
work are suggested by its full title: Nihonkoku genpō zen’aku ryōiki (Record
of Miraculous Recompense for Good and Evil in the Present Life in the
Country of Japan). Most of the stories concern the karmic consequences of
good and evil acts (not just in the present life), but the prominence of the
“country of Japan” in the title is not incidental. The stories are organized
chronologically and usually linked to specific locations in the provinces or
the capital. They start with the reign of Yūryaku (who, as historians point
out, was seen in early Japan as inaugurating a new epoch), but the
majority of tales take place during reigns of Nara sovereigns, with only
the last two making reference to post-Nara period events. With its focus
on reign, place, and genealogy, the Ryōiki is in a sense a Buddhist
counterpart to the Kojiki. As the earliest extant Japanese collection of
the short narratives modern scholars would come to call setsuwa, it is a
clear precursor of later works such as the Konjaku monogatari shū and the
Uji shūi monogatari, but it reflects material that must have been circulating
earlier than its compilation, and thus formed an important part of the
cultural background for other surviving early narrative works.

39
 3
Songs of the Records and Chronicles
torquil duthie

“Songs of the Records and Chronicles,” or kiki kayō, is the name by which
modern scholars refer to the poems or songs that are included in the two
mytho-histories produced by the eighth-century Yamato state. The Kojiki
contains 112 songs, and the Nihon shoki, 128.1 About half of these appear in
both texts, sometimes verbatim and with the same attribution, and other
times in a slightly variant form and a different context. In contrast to the
prose narratives of the texts, which are written in logographic styles consis-
tent with (in the case of the Nihon shoki) and departing from (in the case of the
Kojiki) Literary Sinitic, the songs are written in phonographic styles using
Chinese characters for their sound values. Although there has never been a
clear set of criteria for determining how old the songs actually are, it has been
generally assumed that they are the oldest extant Japanese poetry, older than
the poetry of the Man’yōshū.
The term kayō (literally, “recited song”) does not appear in the Kojiki or
Nihon shoki, both of which simply use the term uta (songs/poems). Kayō first
appeared as a literary category in the early twentieth century and was used to
describe the songs of the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki in order to emphasize the
view that they were oral songs dating from a period prior to the use of
Chinese writing. A highly influential theory that developed in the 1920s was
that many kayō were originally popular “folk songs” (min’yō, a term popular-
ized as a translation of the German term Volkslied) that had been later adopted
by the aristocracy. This idea was the basis of scholarly attempts to reimagine
the original folk or ritual contexts of the songs as they might have existed
prior to their inclusion in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. More recent scholarship
has argued that the songs probably originated during the late seventh century
in the literate context of a court tradition of kayō monogatari (song-tales) about
1
As counted in Yamaguchi Yoshinori and Kōnoshi Takamitsu, eds. Shinpen Nihon koten
bungaku zenshū (SNKBZ), vol. 1, Kojiki (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1997), and Kojima Noriyuki,
ed. SNKBZ, vols. 2–4, Nihon shoki (1994–8).

40
 Songs of the Records and Chronicles

the sovereigns of the past, and has emphasized their function and significance
in the context of the written texts in which they appear.2
The Kojiki and Nihon shoki, each in different ways, legitimize the early
eighth-century political order ruled over by the Yamato “Heavenly
Sovereigns” by tracing their genealogy to a primordial age of the gods and
narrating the history of their conquests and the establishment of an imperial
realm of “all under heaven.” In each text, the songs are presented in the
context of events (journeys, conflicts, marriages, festive occasions) that take
place within that imperial narrative. Given that the Nihon shoki is at least four
times longer than the Kojiki, the songs occupy far more space and play a
much larger role in the latter. Whereas the Nihon shoki is made up mostly of
prose narration, and songs appear only occasionally, in the Kojiki the song-
tales themselves often constitute the bulk of the narrative. In both texts, the
songs appear mostly in the legendary reigns before the sixth century, and are
particularly concentrated in the reigns of certain exemplary sovereigns. The
Kojiki in fact has no songs at all after the sixth century (its last ten reigns
contain only genealogical material) and 88 songs out of its total of 112 appear
in only six reigns, those of Jinmu (13), Yamato Takeru’s father Keikō (15), Ōjin
(11), Nintoku (23), Ingyō (12), and Yūryaku (14). In the Nihon shoki, 86 songs
out of a total of 128 are from before the sixth century, and in the sixth-century
reigns there are almost no songs at all. The distribution among the reigns of
legendary sovereigns is a little more even, but rulers such as Nintoku and
Yūryaku still stand out. This focus on the sovereigns of the fifth century and
earlier suggests an attempt by the late seventh- and early eighth-century
court to trace certain aspects of their political and cultural authority back to
legendary times rather than to the recent past.
The most common poetic theme in both the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki is
that of the ruler’s marriage, which accounts for half of the songs in the Kojiki
and one third of the songs in the Nihon shoki. In both texts the vast majority of
songs are attributed to the ruler (a little less than half in the Kojiki, a little
more than half in the Nihon shoki), to the wives of rulers (ranging from main
consorts, to daughters of lineage chiefs from the provinces, to low-ranking
uneme tribute maidens), or to the political subjects of rulers (ranging from
high-ranking ministers to nameless palace guards). In the Kojiki, over twenty
songs are sung by wives of sovereigns, and over ten by ministers or subjects,
whereas in the Nihon shoki this ratio is reversed, with ten songs by sovereign

2
See Kōnoshi Takamitsu, “Kayō monogatariron joshō,” Nihon bungaku (June 1978), and
“Kayō monogatari,” in Kojiki no tassei (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1983).

41
 torquil duthie

wives, and over twenty-five by ministers or other subjects. The larger

number of songs by rulers’ wives in the Kojiki is a result of the greater
emphasis placed on genealogical connections, whereas the higher proportion
of songs by the sovereign’s subjects in the Nihon shoki is due to its greater
emphasis on administration and government. Following the example of the
Chinese dynastic histories on which it is modeled, the Nihon shoki also
contains in its later chapters several so-called wazauta (children’s songs) and
songs attributed to “the people of the time” (toki no hito) with cryptic omens
concerning changes in succession.
A key problem with the songs of the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki is that many
of them do not seem to fit their narrative context very well. One early theory
about this disjunction was that some of them had been composed indepen-
dently and later inserted into the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, while others were
composed from the outset as part of a narrative.3 However, the standards for
determining which songs were originally “independent” tended to be some-
what arbitrary and varied greatly from one scholar to another. More recently,
close literary analysis of the songs has revealed that some of them both make
close reference to their narrative context and seem curiously disconnected
from it. This suggests that the question is one not of originally “independent
songs” versus “song-tales” that were created as such, but of songs deliberately
being both set within and at the same time set apart from the prose narrative
in order to open up a different kind of discursive space within the text in
which the protagonists of imperial history speak in their own voices.4 In this
reading, the explicit presentation of the songs as being sung or spoken aloud,
typically with the formula “. . . sung, saying” (utaite iwaku), and the naming of
various song-types which seem to describe methods of singing or recitation,
such as shitsu uta (“quiet songs”) or ageuta (“raised songs”), is not a descrip-
tion of a live performance, but the narrative evoking of one. The songs are
written in phonographs not as an attempt to record an oral performance that
existed before and/or beyond writing, but as a textual performance of the
reciting of a song.
A typical example of this disjunction between content and context is the
following song from the reign of Sovereign Nintoku in the Kojiki (KJK 53),
which is recited by Nintoku on a journey to find his consort Kurohime, who
has fled back to her home province of Kibi due to the jealousy of Nintoku’s
main consort:
3
See Tsuchihashi Yutaka, Kodai kayō to girei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965).
4
See Shinada Yoshikazu, “Kayō monogatari – hyōgen no hōhō to suijun,” Kokubungaku
(Jan. 1991).

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 Songs of the Records and Chronicles

Whereupon the Heavenly Sovereign, longing for Kurohime, deceived the

Great Consort saying “I want to see the Island of Awaji,” and when he
arrived at Awaji Island, he looked afar and sang, saying:
Oshiteru ya Naniwa no saki yo From the cape of bright shining Naniwa
Idetachite waga kuni mireba I set out and when I look upon my land,
Awashima Onogoroshima I can see the Self-Congealing Island,
Ajimasa no shima mo miyu and Foam Island, and Palm Tree Island too
saketsu shima miyu I can see the islands afar.
The sovereign then departed from that island and arrived in the land of Kibi.
Then Kurohime led the sovereign to a place towards the mountains and
presented him with a meal.
This episode is followed by a series of songs in which Nintoku and Kurohime
pledge their love to each other before Nintoku returns to the capital and
Kurohime, still fearful of the empress’s jealousy, remains in Kibi. The islands
that Nintoku “can see” in the song – Foam Island (Awashima) and Self-
Congealing Island (Onogoro shima) – are in fact the first mythical islands
created by the gods Izanaki and Izanami at the start of the Kojiki narrative.
As is the case with other “land-viewing” songs, “looking upon” (miru) and
“seeing” (miyu) are expressions of the scope of the emperor’s power. The
song suggests that Nintoku can see (and therefore rules) not only the visible
lands in this world but also the invisible “islands afar” in the world of the
gods, that his vision extends not only to “my land” (waga kuni) on earth, but
also to the mythical islands that were created by his divine ancestors in the
first volume of the Kojiki.
While at first glance the song may appear to be somewhat out of context
within the story of Nintoku’s love affair with Kurohime, a closer reading
reveals that this disjunction makes sense in other ways. Within the prose
account of Nintoku’s ploy to deceive his empress so he can meet Kurohime,
the song stops the linear chronology of the narrative and momentarily opens
up another space of narration in which Nintoku speaks in his own voice of his
mythical vision. The song fits into the allegorical logic of both the Kojiki and
the Nihon shoki in which the sovereign’s looking upon/ruling of the land
often functions as a preface for his sexual conquests, as it also fits within the
context of the larger Kojiki narrative, in which Nintoku is an eminently
virtuous “Heavenly Sovereign” with divine ancestors. The song suggests
that, in spite of his consort Iwanohime’s jealousy, nothing can escape the
mythically legitimized authority of Nintoku’s gaze and desire. At the same
time, by concluding with Kurohime’s decision to stay in Kibi, the episode

43
 torquil duthie

reaffirms the status of Nintoku’s main consort Iwanohime and the preemi-
nence of her lineage, the Kazuraki.
The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki are mytho-historical narratives of the
formation of the imperial realm of Yamato, told from an impersonal per-
spective that is located outside the world of the text. In both works, the songs,
formally distinguished from the prose narrative by their phonographic nota-
tion, open up a space where the protagonists of imperial history speak in the
first person in the temporal present of the world of the narration. Within the
main narrative, the “Heavenly Sovereigns” of Yamato/Nihon are mythically
legitimized as the descendants of heavenly gods who have conquered and
expanded a universal realm of “all under heaven.” Within the performative
space evoked within the written text by the songs, the authority of the “great
lords” of Yamato/Nihon is articulated “live” in their own voices, and by their
subjects’ statements of praise and pledges of submission. For the eighth-
century court, reading or listening to the songs in the Kojiki and the Nihon
shoki mytho-histories was a way to play at experiencing the past as present,
and to celebrate their affinity with the sovereigns and political subjects of
ancient times.

44
 4
Fudoki gazetteers
david lurie

The fudoki are gazetteers: written accounts of the nature and spatial organi-
zation of geographical features (the title literally means “records of lands and
climates,” but could alternately be rendered as “records of lands and their
customs”). These works are a treasure-house of compelling, often fragmen-
tary narratives: heroes struggle to clear horned snake deities from farmland;
deer discuss their dreams; gods and siblings vie for rights to water and land;
the exploits of sovereigns and princes yield a flurry of place names; with
divine assistance a man avenges himself on a shark that has devoured his
daughter; two gods in an endurance contest pit bearing a load of clay against
resisting the urge to defecate.
While titles like Kojiki or Nihon shoki denote single relatively stable works,
“fudoki” is a generic label rather than a title. In discussions of early Japanese
literature the term usually refers to the five “old gazetteers” (ko-fudoki), which
are the only substantial survivors of dozens of such works compiled in
response to a central government order in 713. Confusingly, these early
gazetteers were not originally labeled as “fudoki.” The term derives from
Chinese usage beginning in the Later Han, and seems to have been strongly
associated with the title of a now-lost third-century work; its use to refer to
gazetteers of Japanese provinces cannot be confirmed until the early tenth
century. A venerable Chinese tradition of geographical writing includes
classics like the Shanhaijing (completed by the Later Han), but more direct
precedent for the Japanese gazetteers commissioned in 713 was provided by
official compilations of maps and reports on local products and customs
produced during the Sui and Tang dynasties.
The early Japanese works now known as “fudoki” seem to have been
initially titled along the lines of the one for Hitachi province (modern Ibaraki
prefecture), which is headed: “A Report from the Hitachi Provincial
Governor’s Office on the Ancient Sayings Transmitted by the Elders.” To
complicate matters, a second government order of 925 (preserved in the

45
 david lurie

eleventh-century Ruiju fusenshō) required provincial governors to submit

gazetteers that were explicitly referred to as fudoki. Latter-day commentaries
such as the 1269 Man’yōshū chūshaku and the late thirteenth-century Shaku
Nihongi contain numerous quotations from no-longer-extant gazetteers of
various provinces. Although some of these may stem from texts written or
revised after the 925 order, other such quotations undoubtedly represent
fragments of the original eighth-century reports. This chapter focuses on the
five relatively intact “old fudoki,” but it is important to remember that these
surviving fragments are essential to understanding the scope and content of
the genre; they also contain some of the most interesting and oft-cited stories
from the fudoki corpus.1
An entry from the Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan Continued, 797) for
713 (Wadō 6/5/2; a year and several months after the date of the Kojiki
preface) quotes the executive order that required the production of the
original fudoki:
Apply auspicious characters to the names of the towns and districts of the
provinces of the seven circuits and the capital region. Record in detail the
types of products of those districts: silver, copper, pigments, grasses, trees,
birds, beasts, fish, insects, and so on. Include in records the fertility of the
soils, the origins of the names of mountains, rivers, plains, and fields, and the
ancient sayings and unusual events transmitted by the elders, and report
them to the court.

Scholars typically divide this order into five categories of information: (1)
auspicious orthography for place names; (2) lists of local products; (3) evalua-
tion of soil quality; (4) place name origins; (5) local myths and legends. The
five extant fudoki are often evaluated for their contrasting emphases on these
elements: for example, the Hitachi no kuni fudoki pays almost no attention to
auspicious orthography and contains extensive accounts of local legends,
while the Harima no kuni fudoki consistently notes the soil quality of localities
and firmly roots most of its narrative material in the origins of place names.
The motivations for the five elements of the order are not identical, but all
are clearly linked to the interests of the central government and its local
representatives. Indications of soil quality and local products are of obvious
relevance to the tax system, and the establishment of auspicious place names
projects the power of the central state (and its Sinitic values) and also

1
Scholars since the Edo period have assiduously collected fudoki fragments, which are
included in modern editions and commentaries along with the five comparatively intact
“old fudoki.”

46
 Fudoki gazetteers

potentially confers actual good fortune on those localities. The value of local
lore is not as apparent on the face of the order, but in practice it is clear that
the officials compiling the fudoki used this element of the reports to link local
places to legendary sovereigns said to have sojourned there, with congenial
implications for the political center (and also for their own authority as its
representatives). The fudoki contain much material of local origin, but it is
filtered through the outlook of the central elite, either directly because
provincial officials from the capital worked as compilers, or indirectly
because editors with peripheral origins catered to metropolitan concerns.
Only one gazetteer survives in a complete manuscript: that for the pro-
vince of Izumo (modern Shimane prefecture). The remaining four old fudoki
include one that is missing its introduction and at least one district (Harima
province, the southwestern part of modern Hyōgo prefecture]) and three
abridgements: Hitachi province and two from Kyushu, Bungo (Ōita prefec-
ture) and Hizen (portions of Nagasaki and Saga prefectures). It is only by
chance that these were not lost like dozens of other original gazetteers, but
luckily something of the variety of that corpus is apparent even from this
relatively small sample. They seem to have been compiled over the few
decades following the 713 order: of the extant five, those for Harima and
Hitachi are generally taken to date to the years immediately after the order,
with the Bungo and Hizen fudoki over a dozen years later, in the 730s. Alone
among these, the Izumo no kuni fudoki is explicitly dated, to the fifth year of
the Tenpyō era (733).
It is unlikely that all of the eighth-century fudoki were compiled in the
same way, but in most provinces local officials presumably sent reports on
their districts to the governor’s offices, after which the overall report was
centrally compiled and edited (the subsections of the Izumo no kuni fudoki are
signed by district heads [gunji], and the opening of the Hitachi no kuni fudoki
proclaims it to be a report of the provincial governor [kokushi]). As might be
expected from this complex provenance, and also from their fundamental
role mediating between provincial circumstances and metropolitan ideals,
the extant fudoki are multilayered, polyphonous works, marked by internal
tensions and inconsistencies and by dramatic departures from the content of
other gazetteers, and of other early works such as the Kojiki and the Nihon
shoki.
In keeping with the specifications of the 713 order, the fudoki include
information about place names and their derivations, local products (espe-
cially plants and animals), geographical features (including soil quality), and
customs and legends. Following an initial section describing the province as

47
 david lurie

a whole, they are divided into sub-sections for each district (gun), which is
then further subdivided into entries for townships (gō), and also in some cases
for mountains, rivers, and so on. Within this broad structural framework,
each of the five extant old fudoki has distinctive emphases and tendencies. All
of them are filled with discussions of place name origins and local legends,
but, for example, as mentioned earlier the Harima no kuni fudoki contains
extensive notation of soil quality with comparatively little attention to local
products, while the reverse is the case for the Izumo no kuni fudoki.
In some cases the prose of the gazetteers is workmanlike at best (some
scholars consider the Harima no kuni fudoki to be a draft rather than a finished
product), but others are written with elegance and flair. All of them reflect
the familiarity of their compilers with the vocabulary and usage of formal
literary Chinese-style writings, with extensive borrowing of terms and pat-
terns of expressions from Confucian classics and belletristic anthologies like
the Wenxuan. The Hitachi no kuni fudoki in particular is known for the Sinified
rhetoric of many of its accounts of legends and depictions of local customs.
Like several other fudoki it also incorporates a few vernacular poems, as in
the two irregular tanka (written phonographically) included in a famous
portrayal of the utagaki or kagai, a carnivalesque ritual of song and frolicking
youth convened on Mount Tsukuba. The entry for this district of Hitachi
province traces the approachability of the mountain to an encounter between
the deities of Mount Fuji and Mount Tsukuba and their parent, who
responded to a lack of hospitality by making Fuji isolated and snow-covered,
and rewarded Tsukuba for a generous reception by ensuring that for genera-
tions people would climb the mountain and make offerings. The resulting
ritual is described as follows:
Now, Mount Tsukuba towers above the clouds. The western peak is high
and steep; they call it the male god and do not let anyone climb it. However,
though the eastern peak is covered with boulders there is no end to the
people who ascend it. There is a spring flowing at its side that never runs dry,
regardless of the season. All of the men and women of the eastern provinces
come hand in hand, when the flowers bloom in the spring, when the leaves
turn in the fall, bringing food and drink. On horseback and afoot they climb
up to enjoy the most pleasant recreation. Among their songs are:

Whose invitation
Did she accept,
That girl who said she’d meet me
On Tsukuba’s peak,
That she would not meet me there after all?

48
 Fudoki gazetteers

Oh that dawn
Would come soon,
On this night that I sleep
Without a partner
In a grass hut on the peak of Tsukuba.
They sing so many songs that they cannot all be recorded. It is a local saying
that one unable to obtain a courting prize at the Tsukuba gathering is neither
man nor maid.2
Characteristically, in addition to the story about the mountain deities and the
preceding passage, this entry also includes information about surrounding
territories, recounts a cryptic etymology of the district name, and specifies
the area of a prominent lake.
The fudoki are not unified literary works, but miscellaneous collections of
data and narrative fragments incorporated into a spatial framework. The
importance of this mass of material for the study of early Japanese language,
history, culture, and religion cannot be overstated, but it is understandably
more common for non-specialist readers to approach them in excerpted
form, as discrete myths or legends, or as passages of fine or interesting
writing. Nonetheless an undeniable pleasure of these heterogeneous works
is how often their plodding catalogues of toponyms, local products, and soil
qualities suddenly open out onto vivid narratives and memorable vignettes.

2
The traditional orthography for the toponym is Tsukuha; in the eighth century the final
syllable would have been pronounced “pa.”

49
 5
Man’yōshū
h. mack horton

Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves) is Japan‘s oldest extant anthology of

vernacular verse and the most revered repository of its classical poetic
tradition. Though its last dated poem was composed more than 1,250 years
ago, it has through the centuries been repeatedly characterized as the
fountainhead of the Japanese poetic spirit. Its more than 4,500 verses evoke
visions both of ancient Japanese life and of eternal human concerns. The
anthology is notable for its breadth in terms of years covered, poets included,
and verse forms, topics, and themes represented. Man’yōshū includes approxi-
mately 530 named poets, although half the verses in the collection are of
anonymous authorship. The bulk of its poems were composed over a dozen
decades, from the mid seventh century (though a small number of works
may be earlier) to 759, the year of the last dateable poem (20: 4516).1 Although
the vast majority of poems are tanka of (generally) thirty-one syllables,
several other forms are included, some of them already obsolescent at the
time of its compilation. Unlike later imperial anthologies, there is no preface
detailing its provenance. But internal evidence indicates that it likely began as
a kernel collection of fifty-three verses, compiled in about 700. This ur-
Man’yōshū would have taken shape before the completion of Kojiki
(Record of Ancient Matters, 712) and Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720),
but the anthology reached its final majestic twenty-book size through a series
of expansions that spanned about a century.
Man’yōshū is structured according to a variety of organizational principles,
and a number of different compilers were involved. It is widely believed,
however, that the creation of the final twenty-book anthology was overseen
by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718?–85), and the last four books are mostly drawn
from his personal poetry collection. Much of Man’yōshū was compiled during
1
This is also the final poem in the work. Poems are numbered and cited according to the
text in Kojima Noriyuki, Kinoshita Masatoshi, and Tōno Haruyuki, eds. Shinpen Nihon
koten bungaku zenshū, vols. 6–9, Man’yōshū (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1994–6).

50
 Man’yōshū

the periods of retirement of several female sovereigns who likely had moti-
vating roles in its formation, foreshadowing the prominence of female poets,
diarists, and fiction authors in Heian and Kamakura literature.
Just as Kojiki and Nihon shoki were compiled with the aid of earlier histories
that do not survive, Man’yōshū drew material from numerous other lost
Japanese anthologies that are cited in its pages (e.g. the personal poetry
collection of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro). The final version was also
preceded by Japan‘s oldest extant anthology of verse, Kaifūsō (Florilegium
of Cherished Airs, 751), the preface of which states that many works of
literature were destroyed long before, in a bibliocaust accompanying the
Jinshin succession war of 672. The final twenty-book version of Man’yōshū,
therefore, contains some of the earliest poetry in the vernacular tradition, but
it took shape through a dialogue with a variety of other Japanese models as
well as with anthologies imported from China.
This dialogue is demonstrated most obviously by the fact that the prose
annotations of the anthology are in literary Chinese. The vernacular
Japanese poetry it collects is written in a variety of complex early systems
that use Chinese characters to represent sometimes words (logographs) and
sometimes sounds (phonographs). The latter type, now referred to as man’-
yōgana due to its prominence here, is also used to transcribe vernacular
poetry in other early works such as Kojiki and Nihon shoki. These systems
became obsolete and eventually partially unintelligible after the development
of the simpler hiragana and katakana phonetic systems in the early Heian
period, and much subsequent scholarship on the anthology has been devoted
to recovering its ancient and obscure readings.2
Despite the enormous number and variety of poems, certain overriding
characteristics can be identified. Versification figured in banquets, love affairs,
partings, imperial progresses and other forms of travel, epistolary correspon-
dence, funerals, and other events of heightened significance. There was in
addition a strong performative element to these verses, which were some-
times accompanied by music and dance. Verses were often appreciated in
groups and collectively composed; poetic exchanges are common. Several
poets often contribute to a corporate sequence, or to a group of poems later
sequenced or augmented by an editor.
Man’yōshū poems are, with exceptions, more emotional than intellectual,
and sadness is for the most part found more worthy of poetic expression than
2
Another complicating factor is the fact that the language of the Nara capital in the eighth
century employed eight vowels, rather than the modern five, which added more color to
the phonological palette of the verses.

51
 h. mack horton

happiness. Love poetry, for example, sings more of longing than consumma-
tion, absence rather than presence. So too does travel poetry concentrate
more on homesickness than the diversions of the road, though scenic
description remains essential.
The anthology was compiled during the greatest period of social change in
premodern Japanese history. The years covered by the collection witnessed
the implementation of a wide range of Chinese governmental policies and
cultural practices intended to centralize Japanese imperial power, including
new capitals, new policies of land tenure, and new legal codes. Chinese
historiographical examples spurred the composition of Japanese analogues
in Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and Chinese views of poetry and poetic anthologi-
zation gave rise to new Japanese versions, at the pinnacle of which stood
Man’yōshū. Its verses bear testimony to the monumental transitions from a
preliterate world of song to one of writing and from poetry as communal
ritual to personal lyric expression.

Title and format

In that the anthology contains poetry composed over many decades, the term
man’yō 萬葉, literally “myriad leaves,” is often interpreted to mean “myriad
ages,” a common metaphor found in earlier Chinese texts. Others take
“leaves” instead to be a metaphor for “words” or “poems.” It has even
been suggested that “leaves” means, as in English, “pages,” which were
connected to form scrolls (Yakamochi himself used the character “leaf” this
way). But in view of its prevalence elsewhere at least one meaning of the title
was surely “collection of a myriad ages,” and perhaps also “for a myriad ages.”
Copies of the original text would have been physically massive, as each of
twenty books consisted of one entire scroll. The length of these varied by the
number of poems they contained, but they would have averaged about fifty
feet and weighed about a pound each. Each scroll eventually had a table of
contents (mokuroku), but there were no indexes, so finding a particular poem
was time-consuming, and repetitions inevitably crept in during compilation.
Many of the poems contain textual variants that were inserted interlinearly, a
practice that bears witness to a developing sense of textual criticism. Codex
versions of the anthology appeared in the mid-Heian period, and printed
editions began in the early seventeenth century, culminating in the widely
disseminated Kan’ei hanpon woodblock printing of 1643. The oldest surviving
fragment is the Katsura manuscript from the mid-Heian period, and the earliest
complete version is the Nishi Honganji manuscript from 1266, the base text for

52
 Man’yōshū

most modern editions, which generally include indexes, transliterations of the

original writing system, translations into modern Japanese, and copious notes.

Constituent typologies
The 4,500 or so poems in Man’yōshū include a number of different poetic
forms, all except the few works in Chinese being known by the general term
uta, which means either “song” or “poem.” Ninety percent of the total, 4,200
or so, are in the tanka form, the thirty-one syllables of which are distributed in
five units of five, seven, five, seven, and seven. Those units or measures,
called ku, are often translated as “lines”; they constitute discrete syntactical
sub-units, although poems were not usually represented on the page in
groups of five and seven syllables. The earliest poems are sometimes irregular
in meter, and in certain phonological environments hypermetric (jiamari)
segments appear, though they may have been chanted metrically through
elision (synaloepha); hypometric (jitarazu) segments occasionally appear as
well. Man’yōshū tanka often exhibit stronger pauses after segments two and
four, a division which is termed “five-seven meter” (goshichichō), as opposed
to the tanka of later ages that often favor stronger pauses after the first and
third segments, hence “seven-five meter” (shichigochō). In at least one case
(8: 1635) a tanka was composed by two poets, one providing the opening three
units and the other the last two. Such corporate compositions came to be
known in later ages as tanrenga (short linked verse), precursors of the linked
sequences that became a major poetic form in the medieval period.
The chōka (“long poem”), of which there are 260 or so, comprises an
indeterminate number of alternating units of five and seven syllables and
ends (in its mature form) in a seven-syllable couplet. The longest in the
anthology (2: 199) contains 149 segments. Chōka are usually followed by one
or more tanka (usually called hanka or “envoys” in that environment), which
either restate thematic elements of the longer poem or develop new but
related material. The origin of these short codas is unclear, though influence
from the Korean hugu “following verse” has been suggested. Unlike the
tanka, the chōka did not survive Man’yōshū as a dominant poetic type, though
it continued to be occasionally employed in later ages. The narrative element
that the chōka contributes to Man’yōshū distinguishes the anthology from the
twenty-one imperial anthologies that followed, in which the form survives
only vestigially.
Other poetic forms in the anthology essentially disappeared after the
Man’yōshū age. One is the sedōka or “head-repeating poem,” represented by

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 h. mack horton

sixty-one examples. It consists of thirty-eight syllables in a distribution of five,

seven, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. Another form is the bussokuse-
kika or “Buddha‘s footstone poem” of five, seven, five, seven, seven, and
seven, which takes its name from a group of such poems incised on a
stone, together with a representation of the footprints of the Buddha on a
second stone, in the grounds of Yakushiji temple in Nara. There is only one
example (16: 3885), though other tanka may have been adapted from busso-
kusekika prototypes.
Poetic form is one way in which the collection is organized. Book
Thirteen, for example, includes only chōka and hanka, and its companion,
Book Fourteen, only tanka. But a more conspicuous organizing principle was
by generic type, of which three are basic. These are zōka (“miscellaneous
poems,” originally by and large of a public character), sōmon (poems convey-
ing feelings to another, mostly about love between men and women), and
banka (”[coffin-]pulling poems,” i.e. elegies or dirges). All three genres appear
in all three basic poetic forms (tanka, chōka, sedōka), and all three terms are
taken from the Chinese anthology Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Literature,
c. 520–6), though only zōka and banka are used therein as poetic categories.
Of the three genres, sōmon focus most on quotidian, personal expressions of
emotion, made either declaratively or through metaphor, those two
approaches being identified in the anthology under the rubrics “expressing
feelings directly” (seijutsu shinsho) and “expressing thoughts by means of
things” (kibutsu chinshi). About half the poems in Man’yōshū include love
elements. Other organizational principles are the chronological, the geogra-
phical, and the seasonal. Travel is another main topic; fully a quarter of the
poems either directly or indirectly deal with journeys, and many of those
involve parting or longing for home, thus adding a love element. Despite the
variety of organizational principles, the constituent parts of the anthology
evince close attention to structure and internal cohesion.

Prehistory
Literary histories of Man’yōshū poetry typically divide it into four periods,
starting in the mid seventh century and ending with the last dated poem
(of 759). This leaves a handful of works, mostly prominently placed in the
early books of the anthology, which are attributed to earlier, largely
legendary poets. Though attributions of poems to figures from antiquity are
problematic, several dozen of the poems in the collection are indeed quite old,
dating back well into the seventh and perhaps as early as the sixth century.

54
 Man’yōshū

Most are in Books One and Two, which both open with legendary figures from
the distant past, doubtless positioned there to symbolize the antiquity of the
courtly poetic tradition. Kojiki and Nihon shoki are both associated with
attempts by Emperor Tenmu to demonstrate the legitimacy and indeed the
divinity of his lineage and to provide his realm with written histories analogous
to those of China. Man’yōshū appears to have been undertaken in part with
similar motives, to depict in verse the divine lineage of the ruling house and to
manufacture a poetic “tradition” for native verse like that already long estab-
lished in China.
The earliest figure to whom verse is attributed (however apocryphally) is
Iwanohime, consort of Emperor Nintoku (thought to correspond to an early
fifth-century ruler). The group of poems under her name (2: 85–8) that opens
Book Two of the anthology expresses the worry and frustration of a woman
who waits for her spouse, a theme that would go on to animate much of the
female writing of the Heian period. The verses form a series, in which she
agonizes about whether to continue to wait or to search for him in the hills,
but finally becomes resigned to her vigil. The final form of the sequence was
surely the contribution of a later compiler, who reworked older poems and
added new material.
Man’yōshū begins with a courting verse for a maiden gathering herbs on a
hillside; it was purported to have been composed by Emperor Yūryaku
(thought to correspond to a late fifth-century ruler), who was remembered
as an exemplar both of martial and of cultural endeavors.
ko mo yo With your basket,
miko mochi your lovely basket;
fukushi mo yo with your trowel,
mibukushi mochi your lovely trowel,
kono oka ni maiden, gathering herbs
na tsumasu ko on this hillside,
ie norase tell me your house;
na norasane tell me your name!
sora mitsu Over the sky-seen
yamato no kuni wa land of Yamato,
oshinabete it is I
ware koso ore who rule over all;
shikinabete it is I
ware koso imase who reign over all.
ware koso ba Shall I
norame tell you
ie o mo na o mo my house and my name? (1: 1)

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In this opening verse, the ruler at the beginning of spring encounters a

maiden while viewing the land (kunimi), a ritual in which he ascends a
promontory and gazes over his realm to promote fecundity and prosperity.
Presumably the daughter of a powerful local family, she is collecting herbs,
another spring ritual that would later become a courtly New Year rite
associated with regeneration. Asking for her hand also demonstrates the
ruler‘s intent to establish an alliance with her family, augmenting his own
authority and consolidating his realm. That realm, Yamato, is modified by
the epithet “sora mitsu,” the first example in the anthology of a makurakotoba
(lit., “pillow word,” a later coinage). Such epithets, each of which conven-
tionally modifies a specific noun or set of nouns, may have originally func-
tioned to draw forth the entelechy of the word that followed. Many are so
ancient that their meanings are no longer clear, but their presence as modi-
fiers adds a venerability and grandeur evocative of their original magical
intent. The most common interpretation of “sora mitsu” is “sky-seen,”
relating to a legend in which a god sailed the sky in a rock boat, but another
interpretation is “sky-filling.” In form, the poem is as primeval as its content:
it is a chōka composed of segments of an increasing number of syllables
rather than of the alternating fives and sevens that became the norm. It is also
characteristic of early song in its simple parallelism, a formal aspect that was
strengthened by the introduction in later ages of complex Chinese parallel
structures.
In addition to these verses attributed to Yūryaku and Iwanohime, the
small group of poems from the prehistory of the anthology includes some
said to have been by Prince Karu (13: 3263–4) and Princess Karu (2: 90), who
were later punished for their incestuous love affair. Another early verse
(3: 415) is attributed to Prince Shōtoku (trad. 574–622), an apotropaic com-
position made upon encountering a corpse by the roadside (a common
occurrence in early Japanese journeys and the subject of one of Hitomaro’s
most famous poems).

Period One (629–672)

From the accession in 629 of the ruler later known as Emperor Jomei (?–641),
attributions of authorship gain historical plausibility; the number of poems
also markedly increases. Jomei ascended the throne after the death of the
female sovereign Suiko (554–628), the last ruler represented in the Kojiki.
Literary historians customarily begin Period One of Man’yōshū poetry with
this reign, the verses with earlier attributions constituting a kind of prelude.

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Most of this poetry is by members of the imperial house or figures close to it,
demonstrating the cultural attainment of the court. Like earlier verses,
poems from Period One are represented through the mediation of eighth-
century editors, who introduced anachronistic elements of transcription and
commentary.
Despite the dramatic political changes of the time, the poetry from Period
One begins with a traditional land-viewing composition attributed to Jomei:
yamato ni wa In Yamato
murayama aredo there are many mountains,
toriyorou but when I ascend
ame no kaguyama the most divine of all,
noboritachi heavenly Mount Kagu,
kunimi o sureba and view the lands around,
kunihara wa smoke is rising here and there
keburi tachitatsu from the plains,
unahara wa and birds are rising here and there
kamame tachitatsu from the waters.
umashi kuni so Lovely it is,
akizushima Dragonfly Isle,
yamato no kuni wa this land of Yamato! (1: 2)

This is a paean to natural beauty, but it also contains less apparent ritual
qualities promoting prosperity and averting misfortune. By pronouncing the
land to be “lovely” (umashi), the sovereign hopes the word will act and
reinforce the observation. Land-viewing here, probably accompanied by
music and dance, becomes ritual theater, a state spectacle intended to placate
the gods and reinforce the paramountcy of the ruler. In form, the verse
expands from details to encompass the entire realm, just as Jomei’s imperial
sway radiates from his person throughout the land at large. While the poem
reflects attention to word choice and parallel structure in the depiction of a
lyrical moment, to interpret it merely as a belletristic composition is reduc-
tive and anachronistic.
The impact of Chinese models becomes stronger as Period One pro-
gresses. Part of the richness of Man’yōshū resides in the dialectic of Japanese
and Chinese and the ways in which poets expressed themselves both
through native prototypes and through appropriations from abroad,
often via the Korean peninsula and immigrants therefrom. Chinese influ-
ence is implied in the basic motivation to assemble poetry into an anthol-
ogy and in the even more basic tool of writing that facilitated it. Though
Man’yōshū retains traces of preliterate song, all such songs stood to be

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influenced or reconstituted in the very act of writing them down, and some
that appear as tanka with regularized meter were probably less regular
originally.
Chinese works as early as Shijing (Book of Poems) and Chu ci (The Songs of
the South) were influential in Japan, and the fu (rhapsody, or rhyme-prose) of
the Han encouraged in a general way the development of the fictional
persona and banquet improvisation. But more important was the literature
of the Six Dynasties, a period approximately covering the third through the
sixth centuries, and that of the early Tang. The main sources were the two
sixth-century Chinese anthologies, Wenxuan and Yutai xinyong (New Songs
from a Jade Terrace, c. 545), together with the classified literary encyclopedia
Yiwen leiju (Belles-Lettres Classified, c. 620). Such texts demonstrated which
poetic topics could be introduced in a courtly setting and which images and
rhetoric were to be used to express them. Also important were the Confucian
classics, collectanea of Buddhist scripture, Taoist texts such as Bao pu zi (The
Master Embracing Simplicity, by Ge Hong, c. fourth century), and even
the mildly erotic work of narrative fiction You xianku (A Dalliance in the
Immortals’ Den, by Zhang Zhou [c. 657–730]). The verses of such Six
Dynasties poets as Cao Zhi (192–232), Lu Ji (261–303), Tao Qian (365–427),
and Xie Lingyun (385–443) provided powerful models for Man’yōshū poets. It
has been argued that a Chinese tendency to treat the topic of the poem
obliquely (the yipang style) was of particular importance. This drew attention
to the reasoning process of the viewer as much as to the scene being viewed,
an intellectual approach reflected in locutions involving perception or reali-
zation. Such oblique approaches would go on to become a hallmark of the
Kokinshū style.
The dialectic between native and foreign animates the work of the first
major poet of the anthology, Princess Nukata (or Nukada, c. 627–after 690).
A wife of Prince Ōama (later Tenmu), she bore him a daughter and later
entered palace service in the time of his elder brother Tenji. Her most famous
poem, now known as “The Spring and Autumn Debate” (1: 16), begins with a
headnote in which Tenji orders his minister Fujiwara no Kamatari to adju-
dicate the merits of spring flowers and autumn leaves, presumably in a
Chinese-style poem. Here, Tenji is depicted presiding over a cultured court
whose members attend not only to matters of state but also to artistic
pursuits, which in keeping with venerable Chinese principles were inextric-
ably related. But this literary command was evidently beyond Kamatari, at
which point Princess Nukata responded in his stead, but in the vernacular.
Such proxy composition would be a basic function of palace poets, of whom

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Nukata was an early example. In the end she decides in favor of autumn,
having maintained suspense until the very last syllables of her poem. No
longer a ritual verse to praise deities, provide protection, or promote fertility
and prosperity, the verse is instead a belletristic exercise with a literary
problem and a dramatic solution, one which also has the political effect of
showcasing Tenji’s enlightened court.
Nukata also composed poems of a more ancient, ritual type. Two were
made after Tenji’s death and later appeared in a set of verses created by
members of the late emperor’s female entourage (2: 147–55). A palace poet,
she also figures as a shamaness, and the three chōka and nine tanka that are
attributed to her in the anthology (not all universally accepted) make her the
most distinguished poetic figure of this early Man’yōshū era. Other notable
works from the period include Naka tsu Sumeramikoto’s chōka and hanka in
praise of Jomei (1: 3–4), a chōka and hanka attributed to Prince Konikishi
expressing homesickness while on an imperial journey (1: 5–6), and Prince
Yuge’s love songs for Princess Ki (2: 119–22). There is also a chōka set (1: 13–15)
attributed to Tenji about a love triangle between the three mountains
surrounding what would become the Fujiwara capital. The work of this
period shows a persistence of poetry as oral ritual, even as certain of its poets
begin to assay the more individual forms of expression characteristic of
Chinese verse. This interaction between native ritual song and belletristic
creativity reaches its apotheosis in the next period, in the work of
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro.

Period Two (672–710)

After Tenji’s death in 671 his son Prince Ōtomo (648–72) was defeated by his
uncle, Tenji’s brother Tenmu (Prince Ōama), in the brief Jinshin War the
following year. Tenmu’s absolute monarchy was legitimized by his own
purportedly divine origins, a pedigree first celebrated in song (19: 4260) by
Ōtomo no Miyuki, who fought alongside his liege in the war. The court at
this time began to conceive itself as its own cosmos, rather than as a satellite
of China, even as it progressively adopted aspects of Chinese culture. After
Tenmu’s death in 686, his wife Empress-Consort Uno (Jitō) herself acceded,
reigning until Prince Karu (later Emperor Monmu, 683–707), her grandson by
her prematurely deceased son by Tenmu, was old enough to succeed her. It
was during Jitō’s reign that Fujiwara, Japan’s first Chinese-style capital city,
was constructed; it would remain the capital during the reigns of her two

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successors, Monmu and her half-sister Genmei (661–721), until the move
north to Nara in 710.
Literary historians take the Jinshin War and the move to Nara as the
temporal boundaries of the second period of Man’yōshū poetry. Jitō’s pre-
mier poet so dominates this period that it is sometimes simply referred to as
“the age of Hitomaro.” He is also the first important poet in the collection
not of the imperial family, though his clan title (kabane) indicates that he
was peripherally related. A forebear appears to have been connected to the
Wani, a once powerful house that served the court, but nothing is known of
Hitomaro’s own life, the details in his own verses being tantalizing but
unverifiable. During the eleven years covered by his dateable poetry (687–
707), he composed at least eighteen chōka and sixty-four tanka, thirty-six of
the latter being hanka envoys to chōka poems, meaning that the bulk of his
work was in the chōka-hanka form; 364 poems either composed or collected
by him are labeled as being from the eponymous Kakinomoto no Asomi
Hitomaro kashū (Hitomaro Poetry Collection), which no longer exists, but
served as one of the main sources for Books Seven through Twelve. As
Jito’s principal “palace poet,” Hitomaro produced ceremonial eulogies on
the deaths of princes and princesses and encomia for the court that con-
tributed to the grandeur of the imperial house and the deification of the
sovereign. But he also composed more personal works on parting, travel,
and death, which remain some of the most moving works in the language.
Hitomaro’s oldest dateable verse set (2: 167–9) was written on a theme of
central importance to Jitō, the death in 689 of Prince Kusakabe, her son by
Emperor Tenmu and his presumptive heir. In these earliest of Hitomaro’s
extant poems, his genius is already apparent. The first half of the chōka
recapitulates the founding myth of the dynasty, in which “the eight million
deities, the ten million deities” meet by the riverside in the Plain of High
Heaven and decide that the Sun Goddess Amaterasu should rule the celestial
realm and that her grandson Ninigi should be sent down to rule the Japanese
islands. This venerable history is conveyed in a single, syntactically complex
sentence in which the ends of certain segments are repeated at the beginning
of the ones that follow, an ancient technique also found in Songs of the
Records and Chronicles (kiki) and early liturgies (norito). Thereafter, through
syntactic elision, Ninigi is conflated with Kusakabe’s late father Tenmu, who
likewise rules “as a god.” Mythic time then transitions to the historical
present, wherein the loss of Tenmu’s intended successor in the divine line-
age, Kusakabe, “Peer of the Sun,” is mourned. His death is depicted as his
own ineffable decision, and he causes his own mausoleum to be raised. The

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primordial sweep of the first part of the chōka narrows in the end to the
courtiers, inexplicably bereft of the young sovereign who, had he lived,
would have ruled radiant as “spring blossoms” and “the full moon.” In this
public verse, Hitomaro speaks for the entire court, his lines at once perpetu-
ating imperial divinity even as they lament the break in the imperial
succession.
The death in 696 of another of Tenmu’s sons, Prince Takechi (b. 654),
occasioned the composition by Hitomaro of the longest poem in Man’yōshū
(2: 199–202). Takechi had fought with distinction in the Jinshin War and later
served as great minister of state in the court of his mother Jitō. Hitomaro sets
the stage for Takechi’s accomplishments by describing the background of the
Jinshin conflict, once again speaking of Tenmu in divine terms. Then follows
the only description of a battle in Man’yōshū, in which the young prince leads
his troops to the thunder of drums and the shrill of flutes, loosing a blizzard of
arrows and then charging an enemy that is finally routed with the aid of a
“divine wind” (kamukaze), leaving no doubt as to whose cause is favored by
the gods. The divine wind was an invention of the poet’s, but elements of the
battle scene are drawn from Chinese sources. Hitomaro then turns to
Tenmu’s subsequent reign, in which Takechi serves the sovereign, again
characterized as divine. But just at the height of his glory, Takechi vanishes
from the earth, and his palace becomes a godly shrine. Like Kusakabe’s
retainers, Takechi’s know not what to do in his incomprehensible absence;
they “look back at the great palace,” then “with humility they bury him, bury
him as a god” by heavenly Mount Kagu. The chōka builds and builds,
makurakotoba upon makurakotoba, parallel phrase echoing parallel phrase,
matching in sublime and lofty language the enormity of the event that has
occurred.
The verse treads a fine line, glorifying – indeed, deifying – Emperor Tenmu
while avoiding any direct condemnation of his brother and predecessor Tenji,
who had turned from Tenmu but who was, after all, the father of Tenmu’s
consort and Hitomaro’s sovereign, Jitō. The same care is taken in one of the
best known of all Hitomaro’s elegies, “Passing the Ruined Capital of Ōmi”
(1: 29–31). The verse functions in part as a meditation on evanescence, but it was
doubtless meant as well for spirit pacification (tamashizume). From the head-
note, which has Chinese analogues in its use of the construction “passing [place
name],” it may be that the poet was a traveler. While not condemning Tenji’s
Ōmi court, the verse cordons it off from the new imperium of Tenmu and Jitō,
who moved back from the “hinterlands” to the Yamato heartland.

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sumeroki no Though I understand it was here,

kami no mikoto no the great palace
oomiya wa of that divine
koko to kikedo mo sovereign,
ootono wa though they say it was here,
koko to iedo mo his great hall,
harukusa no when I see the great palace
shigeku oitaru of serried stones
kasumi tachi overgrown
haruhi no kireru with spring grasses
momoshiki no in the rising haze
oomiyadokoro that obscures the spring sun,
miredo kanashi mo I am filled with grief
The poet, a spokesman for the court, cannot use the ruined capital as an
example of the inevitable eclipse of those who rule, as could the author of the
preface to The Tales of the Heike centuries later. And yet the sadness of ruined
magnificence is palpable.
Together with elegies for a distanced past, Hitomaro’s public poetry also
includes works of praise for the current reign, like the pair of chōka-hanka
sets that bear the headnote, “Verses composed by Kakinomoto no Asomi
Hitomaro on the occasion of an imperial progress to the palace in Yoshino”
(1: 36–9). Jitō’s thirty-one journeys to Yoshino, south of the site of Tenmu’s
palace at Asuka, were made perhaps in part to enjoy the natural scenery, but
probably more to commune with the past and to benefit from the mana of
that locale. It was in Yoshino, after all, that Jitō had taken refuge years earlier
with her husband at the time of the Jinshin War that had determined their
fate. The characterization of the area as “pristine” (kiyoki) is thought to
indicate a holy purity, divorced from the mundane. There, the courtiers
compete to serve at the sovereign’s side, with no mention of the trials of the
journey. Indeed, the company travels through an earthly paradise, in imperial
peace and harmony. Hitomaro’s verse has overtones of land-viewing, and the
poet speaks not of his personal emotions, but of the godly sovereign and her
generalized retinue of courtiers.
Hitomaro is also renowned for his verses on personal themes, many
of which likewise involve parting, either from someone left behind or
from someone gone ahead in death. But despite their personal nature,
these too would probably have been presented in public. One of the most
famous is the group of poems (2: 207–16) that, the headnote tells us, the poet
“composed in grief and suffering, weeping tears of blood, after the death of his

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wife.” As with the Yoshino examples above, Hitomaro composed a pair of

chōka on his loss, each followed by hanka. In the first poem it seems initially
that the poet is still looking forward to another meeting with his beloved; the
fact of her death is not apparent until halfway through the verse. When it is
finally unveiled, the preterite is used for the first time, making the shock to
the listener or reader all the more wrenching. We then accompany the
bereaved husband to the market that his departed spouse used to frequent,
but which is now barren. The poem thus divides into preparation and conclu-
sion, the details of the speaker’s love expressed in the beginning heightening his
loss at the end. The two hanka that follow are an essential part of the whole,
deepening the pathos of the husband’s desire to do anything possible to
assuage his longing, and then depicting a later time when the immediate
pain seems dulled, only to stab at the heart again.
Another particularly renowned pair of chōka-hanka sets depicts the speak-
er’s parting from a woman in Iwami province (western Shimane prefecture)
to journey back to the Fujiwara capital. The first of this group (2: 131–7) is
again constructed in two parts; the preparatory half of the verse describes the
natural surroundings, a distant seacoast that may seem to the outsider to
have no redeeming value. But the speaker knows better, for it is here that his
spouse lives, she who curls beside him like the sea-plant that floats on the
waves. As in so much of Hitomaro’s work, nature is not so much a backdrop
as a participant in the poem, and it sets the tone and provides the metaphors
for what is to come. Again the verse begins in the present, the landscape of
Iwami being the same now as it was in the past. Then the past tense is used to
great effect for the first time with “the girl would come and lie beside me, like
gem-plant,” at which point we know the man has already parted from her.
Here too we do not see the moment of parting but only the aftermath;
Hitomaro’s speaker looks back “ten thousand times” down the twisting road,
but as in Karu, he can do nothing more in the end than make a futile gesture,
here commanding the mountains themselves to bow down so that he might
have a last view of where his spouse lives.
The verse also demonstrates the interrelationships between Man’yōshū
genres; these verses are sōmon, because the speaker is thinking of another,
though they do not actually exchange poems. But the only difference
between this set of verses and banka are that the person has not died. The
parting is as final, though, given the fragility of human life in premodern
society. Travel too overlaps with the sōmon genre, as parting, travel, and
distance are often what bring about thoughts of an absent other. And in its
hardship and danger, travel may also require banka for strangers who met

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their ends on lonely roads, as in another of Hitomaro’s great chōka, com-

posed “upon seeing a dead man among the rocks on the island of Samine in
Sanuki” (2: 220–2). In the seventh century, attention was paid to improving
the country’s network of roads, but travel was still travail, and all travel was
foreign travel; once beyond the confines of his native heath, the traveler was
cut off from his own spoken dialect and, worse, from his native gods.
Unknown deities in unknown places might take umbrage at his incursion,
and mortal illness might result. Thus poems “encountering a corpse on the
roadside” constitute an established sub-genre of travel verse, with Chinese
analogues. It is sad but fitting to note that Hitomaro himself is reputed to
have perished on a journey, like another great travel poet of almost exactly a
thousand years later, Matsuo Bashō. The legend springs from a verse (2: 223)
whose headnote tells us Hitomaro composed it “in grief at the point of death
in Iwami province.” The irony is multiplied by the assertion that he died in
Iwami, the place in which he had earlier taken leave of a woman he loved,
although many question the provenance of this verse.
Hitomaro’s poetry is often characterized as demonstrating the intersection
of ancient oral formulae from the primordial past with the new art of writing
and more advanced rhetoric, some of it inspired by Chinese examples.
Certainly this is true, though that intersection can already be seen in the
work of, for example, Princess Nukata before him. Hitomaro’s accomplish-
ment lies in the genius with which he accomplished the concatenation. He
has also been characterized as having developed an original lyric voice out of
the old, ritually charged words. This too is true; Hitomaro’s chōka in
particular can be mistaken for no one else’s. But his poetry, on either public
or personal themes, never lost its close connection to ritual, and in his public
verse, at least, self-expression was not his primary purpose. Such verse was
intended to aggrandize and indeed deify his patrons, the ruling members of
the imperial house. But for this public poetry, politically motivated and
ritually charged, to be successful, it also had to move its listeners, and this
Hitomaro accomplished through skillful manipulation of lofty, ritual voca-
bulary set within the inexorable rising tide of his extended parallel structures.
His verses on personal themes also may have had a political effect (exploited
by later editors) in that they too showed that a culturally enlightened imperial
house had fostered such a poetic efflorescence. As the leading court poet of
his generation Hitomaro’s genius was immediately recognized. Ōtomo no
Yakamochi speaks of his debt to Hitomaro in a headnote to one of his own
chōka sets (17: 3969–72), and the bard later came to be considered a patron
saint of the Japanese poetic way.

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Though Hitomaro utterly overshadows his contemporaries of Period

Two, some of them are nevertheless memorable in their own right. One is
Takechi no Kurohito (fl. end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth
century), whose nineteen extant tanka are entirely about travel. The verses
are typical of the developing travel mythos in their depiction of melancholy
on the journey, rather than of exciting discovery. Though Kurohito shared
much with Hitomaro, particularly his penchant for travel, his own poetic
approach to passing the ruined capital of Ōmi (3: 305) is quite different, with a
focus more on himself than on the scene.

Period Three (710–733)

The formidable female sovereign Jitō died in 703, her passing bringing a
temporary end to imperial journeys to Yoshino and causing a hiatus in the
sponsorship of palace poetry that some cite as a reason for ending Period
Two in that year. Others set the final year even in 701, the end of Hitomaro’s
known span of activity. But the more common line of demarcation for Period
Three is drawn at 710, when the capital of Heijō (Tranquil Citadel) was
proclaimed in Nara to the north of Fujiwara. A new breadth of style and
approach characterizes this period of Man’yōshū poetry, together with a
developing sense of individuality and experimentation. While the chōka
never again reached the heights of sublimity it had with Hitomaro, it
remained a vibrant art form in the hands of “palace poets” like Yamabe no
Akahito (fl. 724–36), Kasa no Kanamura (fl. 715–33), and Kurumamochi no
Chitose (or perhaps Chine, fl. 720s–730s). It was also productively incorpo-
rated into new types of poetic sequences with long prefaces or afterwords in
Chinese prose by the two leaders of the “Kyushu (or Tsukushi) poetic circle”
(both modern terms), Ōtomo no Tabito (665–731) and Yamanoue (or
Yamanoe) no Okura (660–c. 733). Takahashi no Mushimaro (fl. 720s–c. 737)
crafted narrative poems of material from Japanese legend, and Lady Ōtomo
no Sakanoue (c. 695–fl. until 750) maintained the poetic prominence of the
Ōtomo after Tabito’s death, even as she became the de facto head of the
house until Tabito’s son Yakamochi reached maturity.
From the point of view of poetic composition, the early years of the Nara
capital were not particularly productive. There are no poems from imperial
progresses from the sixteen years of the reigns of empresses Genmei and
Genshō, and of the major poets of the era there is only a single set by Kasa no
Kanamura (2: 230–2). But in 723, the year before the accession of Jitō’s
grandson Emperor Shōmu (701–56), imperial progresses to Yoshino

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recommenced, and with them, chōka in praise of the imperium. Shōmu’s

reign was a brilliant period of courtly, Buddhist, and international flavor. A
peripatetic sovereign, he made journeys to Kii, Yoshino, Naniwa, and Inano,
which are memorialized in the verses of Kanamura and his fellow palace poet
Yamabe no Akahito. While those poets continued to compose poetry in the
service of the court as had Hitomaro before them, discourse on rulership in
the new capital was shifting emphasis from divinity and charisma to the
ritsuryō legal codes. Akahito and Kanamura perpetuate Hitomaro’s
approaches to imperial praise, but their poetry in certain ways departs from
his model and explores new avenues of expression.
Though almost nothing is known of the life of Yamabe no Akahito, he
eventually came to be paired with Hitomaro (whose background is just as
vague) as one of the two great poets of the Man’yōshū age, with Ki no
Tsurayuki asserting in the preface to Kokinshū that “it was impossible for
Hitomaro to excel Akahito, or for Akahito to rank below Hitomaro” (trans.
Helen Craig McCullough). His extant oeuvre is smaller than Hitomaro’s,
with only thirteen chōka and thirty-six tanka, and the chōka are shorter. His
adoption of the Hitomaro idiom is clearly seen in such verses as 6: 923–5, a set
on the Yoshino palace. The two hanka, both masterpieces, pursue topoi
introduced in the chōka. Doubtless the set was meant to evoke the vitality
and life-force inherent in the locale. But a personal element is also interjected
there in a reference to the call of plovers, which implies homesickness or sad
thoughts of the past, as in Hitomaro’s earlier verse (3: 266) about hearing
them at Ōmi.
As opposed to his brilliant treatment of the hanka, Akahito’s approach to
the chōka has been described as perfunctory. But it has also been argued that
he exploits Hitomaro’s earlier work to establish a connection between the
present monarch and the earlier sovereigns who viewed the Yoshino region
as a spiritual center. Like his palace-poet predecessor, Akahito describes
Yoshino in terms of its confluence of river, mountains, and blossoms,
where “the courtiers of the great palace of serried stones” pay eternal
homage. And like Hitomaro, Akahito evokes that perpetuity in parallel
phrases. And yet unlike Hitomaro, who explicitly involves Empress Jitō in
his composition, Emperor Shōmu remains an abstraction for Akahito, who
prefers to imply the sovereign’s glory through the sublimity of the space he
inhabits.
Akahito gives new emphasis to the beauty of nature for its own sake.
Scenic description, which in Hitomaro’s public poetry is a means to express
imperial glory, is for Akahito becoming an end in itself (though overtones of

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ancient land-viewing persist). This is true for many of the tanka in his oeuvre,
with the result that he is remembered primarily as a master of the shorter
tanka form and as a pioneering proponent of Japanese nature poetry. The
centrality of nature is also characteristic of his verses composed in a personal
capacity. Perhaps the most famous of these is a chōka-hanka set composed
“on viewing Mount Fuji” (3: 317–18). Imbued with the dignity of ancient land-
viewing songs, the chōka employs ritual vocabulary. It is anachronistic to
conflate such verses with what is now referred to as “landscape poetry,” but
in the hanka, Akahito is clearly giving new prominence to natural description
as an end in itself:
tago no ura yu Passing Tago Bay,
uchiidete mireba I come into the open and look:
mashiro ni so pure white,
fuji no takane ni on Fuji’s lofty peak,
yuki wa furikeru snow has fallen!
Such scenic description assumes central importance in the seasonal books of
subsequent imperial poetic anthologies.
On his journey with the sovereign to Yoshino in 725, Akahito was accom-
panied by his fellow palace poet Kasa no Kanamura, who likewise comme-
morated the event (6: 920–2). The Kasa were an ancient house lately fallen to
middling rank in the court hierarchy. Kanamura has forty-three poems
remaining, eleven of which are chōka. Again like Akahito, he bases his
Yoshino verses on those of Hitomaro, but he too places increasing emphasis
on the scene that the emperor beholds. Kanamura also composed verses
about a woman awaiting her spouse (4: 543–5), a proxy set on behalf of a lady
whose lover was traveling in the imperial train to Kii Province (Wakayama
and southern Mie prefectures). Even though the speaker acknowledges that
travel has its pleasures, it is the hardship of the journey, shared by the one
who leaves and the one left behind, that will become central to the develop-
ing poetic travel mythos. There are parallels to works like the last of the
“Nineteen Old Poems” (c. second century) collected in Wenxuan, a famous
Chinese example of the traveling man and the waiting woman that also
contrasts pleasure and misery.
But the impact of Chinese examples is best seen in the context of the
creativity of the Kyushu poetic circle, most notably Ōtomo no Tabito and
Yamanoue no Okura. Their compositions, which include some of the best-
remembered verses in the anthology, are poles apart from early Man’yōshū
poetry or from the work of Hitomaro. The project of Tabito and Okura was

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nothing less than the creation of a new literary corpus born of the fusion of
vernacular verse and Chinese literary forms and themes, to produce an
amalgam meant to be appreciated less as oral than as written literature. In
the process, they generated new kinds of sequences with learned Chinese
prose forewords or afterwords, accretive compositions with multiple author-
ship, and flights of fictional versiprosa, variously informed by elements of
Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophy.
The innovation of the Kyushu circle, active from 728 to 730, resulted not
only from the brilliance of Tabito and Okura, but from the fact that they were
not “palace poets,” who were required to compose (at least in their official
capacities) on topics of imperial concern. The circle had its beginnings when
Tabito made the month-long journey to northern Kyushu to take up his post
as governor-general of the Dazaifu commandery. Built originally to defend
against invasion by Silla, Dazaifu also served as the gateway from the
continent, which made its residents well placed to learn of Chinese literary
developments.
Despite the vast difference in poetic approach between Tabito and
Hitomaro, they were of the same generation, which shows how Man’yōshū
poetry simultaneously developed along numerous trajectories in a short
period of time. Tabito’s main period of activity, however, occurred in his
late years, which is why he is assigned to Period Three of Man’yōshū history.
And while almost nothing is known of Hitomaro’s biography, Tabito is the
first of the major Man’yōshū poets whose life can be traced in detail. He
became head of the Ōtomo, an ancient military house that had long served
the throne, in 714, and five years later was promoted to the office of middle
counselor. He then continued the military traditions of his forebears by
containing a rebellion in southern Kyushu in 720, which may have been the
reason he was made governor-general in 728, when he was already 64 years
old. There, he developed friendships with such literati as Tajihi no Agatamori
(?–737), Ki no Ohito (682–738), Manzei (fl. 704–31), and most importantly,
Yamanoue no Okura. Also adept at poetry in Chinese, Tabito was a member
of the salon of Prince Nagaya (684 [or 676]–729), and had Chinese-style verses
included in Kaifūsō. Such accomplishments informed his literary approach
during his Dazaifu years.
Yamanoue no Okura was appointed governor of Chikuzen province
(where Dazaifu was located) in late 725 or early 726. The two men evidently
had only limited contact at first, but their interaction increased dramatically
after the death of Tabito’s wife. Okura also had risen to high office and to
literary prominence late in life. Though his origins are still debated, it is likely

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that he was born in Paekche and taken to Japan as a child by his father, a
physician, after Paekche was overcome by Silla in 663. It was his foreign
heritage, and probably his skill at Chinese, that led to his inclusion as a low-
level emissary with the Japanese mission to the Tang in 702. During his stay in
China, perhaps for as long as six years, he composed a verse (1: 63) that is
thought to be the only one in Man’yōshū made abroad. When he finally
returned to Japan he was appointed governor of Hōki province (western
Tottori prefecture, on the Japan Sea) in 716. His scholarship received public
recognition in 721 when he was made tutor to the crown prince, the future
Emperor Shōmu, and it may have been at this time that he compiled a now-
lost personal anthology of poetry that later became a source of material for
Man’yōshū: Ruijū karin (Classified Forest of Verses). It was likely organised on
principles borrowed from Chinese literary encyclopedias like Yiwen leiju.
The bulk of the work of Tabito, Okura, and other affiliates of the Kyushu
poetic circle is recorded in Book Five of Man’yōshū, which together with 104
tanka and ten chōka includes two poems in Chinese, ten Chinese prefaces to
sequences of Japanese verse, five letters in Chinese, and one extended
Chinese essay. This heavy Chinese presence gives Book Five a different
character from the rest of the anthology and demonstrates the commitment
of Tabito and Okura to constructing an amalgam in which Japanese and
Chinese are posited as equal.
Book Five opens with a tanka “by Lord Ōtomo, governor-general of
Daizaifu, in response to doleful tidings,” prefaced by a short letter in
Chinese parallel prose (5: 793). It is unknown to whose death or deaths the
title refers, but in view of the first line of the letter, which speaks of doleful
tidings mounting up, it seems that several are involved. This initial poem is
followed by another versiprosa group (5: 794–9) by Okura, which begins with
two Chinese works – a prose essay expatiating on evanescence in terms of
Buddhist philosophy and a four-line poem – and ends with a vernacular
chōka, with hanka, entitled “Japanese Elegy.” The title establishes parity
between the two writing systems involved in the set. Again, the identity of
the deceased is unclear; probably Tabito’s wife, but perhaps Okura’s.
The combination of Chinese-style preface and Japanese poetry is nowhere
better demonstrated than in a thirty-two-verse sequence composed for a
plum-blossom viewing banquet at Tabito’s mansion in 730 (5: 815–46). The
event and its literary manifestation were based on one held in China in 353,
immortalized by the “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection” by Wang
Xizhi (321–79, or perhaps 307–65), which served as an important model when
such prefaces became popular in the Tang. Plums had been imported to

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Japan from China, where they were associated with the image of the scholar,
which gave Tabito’s banquet a pronounced Chinese aspect. Like the first two
poetic sets in Book Five, the composition opens with Chinese-style prose,
variously attributed to Tabito or Okura, whose literary relationship was
clearly symbiotic. The form in which the gathering is recorded suggests
that guests composed verse extemporaneously, with one poet responding
to the next in a manner premonitory of medieval Japanese linked verse. But it
is also possible that only some of the poems were composed on the spot, with
others (most likely the final twelve) having been sent in later by poets unable
to attend. Still another theory brands the entire event an idealized fiction.
The thirty-two verses are followed by later additions, the last of which depicts
plum blossoms that address the poet in a dream.
Immediately following the plum-blossom series is a completely fictional
creation, “An excursion to Matsura River” (5: 853–63). Like the preceding
group, it begins with a Chinese preface in which a fictional speaker describes
an encounter with beautiful maidens fishing. They assert that they are lowly
seafolk, but their speech, full of learned Sinitic references, indicates other-
wise; they then invite the traveler to grow old along with them, and he
agrees. Eleven poems follow: three groups of exchanges between the traveler
and the beauties, and then three appended verses attributed to “the venerable
governor-general.” The preface borrows from You xianku, in which a traveler
encounters elegant women living in obscurity, a plot that anticipates later
Japanese tale literature, notably Ise monogatari and Genji monogatari. (It may
also include echoes of “Rhapsody on the Luo River Goddess” by Cao Zhi,
from Wenxuan.) It is unclear who composed the set, but “venerable gover-
nor-general” sounds like Tabito. It seems to have been he, furthermore, who
sent the Matsura River and plum-blossom sequences to a friend in the capital,
who sent back verses “harmonizing” with the plum-blossom sequence,
prefaced by a euphuistic letter in Chinese. (Such responses from the capital
show that amalgams of poetry and prose in Chinese and Japanese were not
limited to the Kyushu poetic circle.) These two sequences demonstrate the
degree to which Chinese literature had become the stock-in-trade of Nara
literati, and also the way that original works could be augmented and
reshaped by later hands into corporate creations.
Tabito endured many trials in his last years. He was a member of the salon
of Prince Nagaya and suffered by association when the prince was charged
with treason and forced to commit suicide in 729. Then he was appointed in
his mid-sixties to the distant post in Kyushu, where he soon lost his wife.
These hardships have been adduced as the motivation behind his

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composition of another memorable sequence, “Thirteen Verses in Praise of

Wine” (3: 338–50). While there is no need to give these poems a biographical
reading, their overriding Taoist mentality is clear. Nor are they as simple as
they may seem; they contain, for example, allusions to the Seven Sages of the
Bamboo Grove and to Zheng Quan, who wished to be buried next to a kiln,
and, after he had turned to earth, to be remade into a sake jug. The
syncretistic outlook of the Nara aristocrat is also in evidence here, as one
verse is based on Buddhist notions of karma and rebirth.
Tabito also composed in more traditional vernacular modalities. One
example is a set of five tanka elegies (3: 446–50) purporting to depict his
journey back to the capital in 730, when as a widower he returned past places
he had seen on his way to Kyushu with his wife years before. Also in a more
traditional idiom is a set on Yoshino (3: 315–16). To judge from the headnote,
Tabito evidently assumed that he might be commanded by the sovereign to
compose, and so he prepared the verses for that eventuality, which did not
materialize. The set cannot be read today without recalling the Hitomaro
poems about Yoshino (1: 36–7) and perhaps Samine (2: 220–2) that evidently
informed it. The verses show that Tabito was a poet of rare versatility,
capable of original Chinese–Japanese amalgams, but also, when the situation
warranted, of works that drew on venerable convention.
But the member of the Kyushu poetic circle who made the greatest
contribution to Japanese letters was Yamanoue no Okura, the poet with
the most distinctive voice in all of Man’yōshū. Although it is hard to tell in
some cases which parts of a sequence were composed by Okura and which by
Tabito, it appears that Okura was responsible for twelve or so chōka,
sixty-nine tanka (of which twenty-eight are hanka), two Chinese poems,
and twelve works of Chinese prose in Man’yōshū. He first appears in Book
Five in the above-mentioned “Japanese Elegy,” the first truly philosophical
poem group in the anthology. There, he sets forth the Buddhist principle of
the evanescence of all things, then applies it to the inevitability of human
aging and then, in a Confucian spirit, to husbands and wives and their bond,
gradually narrowing his focus to address the death of a spouse, which is then
reexpressed in the vernacular chōka that follows.
Okura presented “Japanese Elegy” to Tabito along with three other chōka-
hanka sets, a sequence of three sequences: “To a Deluded Heart” (5: 800–1),
“Thinking of his Children” (5: 802–3), and “On the Impermanence of Life”
(5: 804–5). All three address the anxiety of existence, encapsulated in the
phrase “human life” (yo no naka or seken) which appears in each. “To a
Deluded Heart” admonishes “Master Spurn-the-World” (recalling similar

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forms of address in Taoist works), who on the pretext of philosophical

detachment ignores the brevity of life and his Confucian obligation to
support and protect his family. Some suggest that Okura wrote the poem
as a didactic piece in his capacity as provincial governor. But it may be that
“Master Spurn-the-World” is none other than Okura himself, who is trying to
solve his own internal conflict between love and renunciation, duty and
escape. The same struggle between philosophy and feeling is seen in Okura’s
next set, “Thinking of his Children.” As in the previous poem, the intellectual
argument is presented in the Chinese-style preface, and the emotional one in
the Japanese poem. Here Okura begins by stating that even the Buddha loved
his son Rahula despite his recognition of the pain that such attachment
entails. In the vernacular verses that follow he writes of melons and chest-
nuts, small yet moving images from daily life that evoke the conflict between
parental love and the cares it brings. Perhaps they were treats his children
particularly liked. But scholars have pointed to a possible connection
between those images and the “pears and chestnuts” that the Six Dynasties
poet Tao Qian mentions in a poem about his nine-year-old son, and melons
and chestnuts also figured in celebrations of conception and birth, thus
bringing children to mind even more strongly. The last of the three sets,
“On the Impermanence of Life,” again begins with a Chinese preface that
introduces its theme in philosophical terms, contrasting the ease with which
trials accumulate and the difficulty with which they are dispelled. The
speaker then switches from the “telling” to the “showing” mode in the chōka,
lamenting how soon frost comes to the black tresses of pretty young women
and how soon the young men who spend nights in their embrace must
exchange their hunting bows for old men’s canes.
Okura’s love of children, a comfort in an old age plagued with pain, is
nowhere more excruciatingly demonstrated than in the chōka and two hanka
that follow these, entitled “Three Poems Longing for a Boy named Furuhi”
(5: 904–6), which end Book Five of Man’yōshū. Readers partial to biographical
interpretation have taken the child in question to be Okura’s own; others, in
view of the Kyushu circle tendency toward fictionalization and proxy poetry,
have suggested that the boy was imaginary. Okura begins with a short, de
facto preface that appears to be a Buddhist denial of the “seven treasures,”
until it transpires that the boy is for him even more precious, indeed “a pearl.”
He then exploits a traditional two-part chōka structure to show dramatically
why the little boy was so loved, thus strengthening the effect of his death.
This was Hitomaro’s technique in his poem on the death of his wife in Karu,
and here, as there, the awful fact of death comes just as the poet has tempted

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fate, secure “as in a great ship” of the boy’s future. And here too, the present
tense is employed to give the entire narrative a dramatic sense of immediacy,
accentuated by occasional irregular syllabification, which seems to reflect in
formal terms the disorder in the speaker’s heart.
In contrast to Hitomaro, who like poets of later generations gives in his
personal poetry his most vital expression to love for a spouse, Okura is most
moved by the bonds between parents and children. Even in his unique depic-
tion of social injustice, “Dialogue on Poverty and Destitution” (5: 892–3), which
again relies on details from daily life expressed in the vernacular, the climax
occurs when the destitute man describes his failure to provide for his family:
fuseio no on the straw-strewn
mage io no uchi ni earthen floor
hitatsuchi ni of my hovel
wara tokishikite with its canted roof,
chichi haha wa my father and mother
makura no kata ni at my pillow
mekodomo wa and my wife and children
ato no kata ni at my feet
kakumiite surround me
uree samayoi with their wailing;
kamado ni wa the stove
hoke fukitatezu sends up no smoke,
koshiki ni wa and in the rice kettle
kumo no su kakite a spider spins its web,
ii kashiku for we have forgotten
koto mo wasurete what it is to cook rice,
nuedori no and they moan
nodoyoi oru ni like the mountain thrush
Such poems on social concerns constitute an important theme in Chinese
poetry (indeed, Okura borrows Chinese imagery in this chōka) but are rare in
the Japanese tradition. Their first-person point of view makes them particu-
larly dramatic and affecting.
Okura is a poet of dialectic: between love and loss, parent and child, youth
and old age, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, mind and heart,
expressed with a concomitant formal contrast of Chinese and Japanese,
prose and poetry. Like Tabito, he is not primarily a poet of nature but of
the human condition, yet while Tabito sometimes uses verse as cultured
escape, Okura confronts the pathos of life. With their structural innovations,
probing philosophical enquiry, and plentiful references to Confucian texts,
Buddhist tracts, and Chinese poetry, Okura’s works are very different from

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the simpler verses of only a few decades before, but they likewise conclude in
emotion; their disciplined recognition of the inevitability of age and death
and their perception of the futility of attachment to the self and to others
coexist with an utterly human desire for life, family, and peace.
The poetry of this period also includes the work of Takahashi no
Mushimaro, who though not a member of the Kyushu circle possessed a
voice likewise original, particularly in his interest in legends and folkways.
He appears to have been a contemporary of Yamabe no Akahito, to whom he
is often compared. Like Akahito, he was a “professional” poet, having served
Fujiwara no Umakai and also perhaps a prince. Mushimaro’s travels appear to
have taken him to the eastland, since he wrote verse about Mount Tsukuba
(9: 1757–8). It suggests that for him travel was changing from the journeys made
by necessity in the earlier years of the collection to ones made to refresh the
spirit with inspiring vistas. Climbing to the summit, he enjoys the view of fields
of pampas grass, geese, and waves on Toba Lake, and concludes, “Seeing how
good is the peak of Tsukuba, the sadness that grew over the long days of
travel vanishes from my thoughts.” There may still be some element of earlier
praise of the land, but the focus is now on the speaker and his own state of
mind. The land now serves the poet, rather than vice-versa. Here is another
manifestation of the stronger sense of the individual that will become even
more marked in the last period of Man’yōshū and thereafter. Mount Tsukuba is
also the setting for a chōka-hanka set (9: 1759–60) by Mushimaro that portrays
an earthy folk event called a kagai or utagaki (also described in Hitachi no kuni
fudoki), in which young men and women were given license to exchange
courting songs and couple, perhaps originally to promote the fecundity of
the land. Like Akahito, Mushimaro also appears to have written a poem about
Mount Fuji (3: 319–21), though not all commentators attribute it to him.
Though both poets are overwhelmed by Mount Fuji’s divine power and
majesty, Akahito wants more to paint a picture of the mountain, while
Mushimaro (if it was he) is more interested in telling its story.
Mushimaro (9: 1807–8) and Akahito (3: 431–3) also wrote verses about the
legend of the maiden Tegona, of Mama in Katsushika in the eastland, who
suffered not from an absent lover but from suitors all too persistent.
Mushimaro recounts the story of this young woman of such beauty that
she attracts young men “like summer insects drawn to a flame.” Overcome
by attention she does not seek, she lies down to die. Though likewise taken
by this tale, Akahito, by contrast, again avoids elaborating on a story he
evidently assumes the reader already knows. As in Hitomaro’s verse on
passing the ruined capital of Ōmi, he reflects on how the passage of time

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has erased all evidence of Tegona’s grave, but not her memory. Just as in
many noh plays of later centuries, Akahito’s composition is “all end,” the
events having occurred long ago, leaving only poignant reminiscence.
Another young woman in a similar predicament is depicted in
Mushimaro’s “A Poem (with Tanka) on Seeing the Grave of the Maiden of
Unai” (9: 1813–15). Here the girl grows to womanhood and attracts the
attentions of two young rivals; they take up weapons ready to compete for
her, and the maiden forestalls their mortal combat by taking her own life. But
the two youths follow her in death and are buried to either side of her grave.
The legend was later retold in Yamato monogatari (Tales of Yamato) and then
in the noh play Motomezuka.
Mushimaro’s longest and best-known work is “A Verse on Uranoshimako
of Mizunoe, with a Tanka” (9: 1740–1), which recounts the legend of a man
known in later centuries as Urashima Tarō. While out fishing one day, he
encounters the daughter of the sea god, and they become man and wife,
living in her father’s palace at the bottom of the sea. But inevitably he misses
his home, asks leave to visit, and when he does, he finds that all has changed
beyond recognition. He carries a magic comb box given to him by his wife
that will allow him to return to her if he does not open it, but open it he does,
and he immediately ages and dies. This Rip van Winkle story approaches the
theme of evanescence from the opposite side, wherein a man has eternal life
and happiness assured him, but gives it all away.

Period Four (733–759)

Most scholars begin the last of the periods into which Man’yōshū is divided in
733, with the death of Yamanoue no Okura and the first extant dateable poem
by Tabito’s son Yakamochi, the dominant poet of the late Man’yōshū age
(6: 994). The decade of the 730s was one of transition; Tabito died in 731,
and Kasa no Kanamura disappeared from the literary scene two years later.
And yet Yamabe no Akahito left works that can be dated to 734 and 736, and
Takahashi no Mushimaro too may have remained active until about the same
time, with the result that some prefer to continue Period Three to 736. In any
case, many important poets died or disappeared from the records in the early
and middle years of the decade. The years 735–7 witnessed the greatest
epidemic in recorded Japanese history, with catastrophic economic and
political consequences. The deaths of the leaders of the four branches of the
Fujiwara house left the political field open for their rival Tachibana no Moroe
(684–757, the patron of Ōtomo no Yakamochi) and for other anti-Fujiwara

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factions. (The poets Akahito, Kanamura, and Mushimaro may also have
perished in the epidemic.)
Ensuing political instability led Emperor Shōmu, who had come to the
throne in 724, to abandon the Nara capital in 740 for a period of shortlived
attempts to found new capitals elsewhere in central Japan. He did not return
to Nara until 745. These years of travel were memorialised by Tanabe no
Sakimaro (fl. 740s), who wrote official poetry in praise of the nascent capital
at Kuni (north of Nara) and also of the later move to Naniwa (in modern
Osaka). Remembered as the last of the Man’yōshū palace poets, Sakimaro
resuscitates Hitomaro’s vocabulary of imperial encomia in such composi-
tions as “Two Poems in Praise of the New Capital at Kuni, with Tanka”
(6: 1050–8). His expression of sadness on the abandonment of the Nara capital
(6: 1047–9) also recalls the earlier poet’s description of the ruined capital of
Ōmi. One of the most important poets in the last period of Man’yōshū not of
Ōtomo descent, Sakimaro left a collection (now lost) that supplied verses on a
variety of familiar themes, including, for example, the discovery of a corpse
while on a journey (9: 1800). The collection also included verses on the legend
of the Maiden of Unai (9: 1801–3) and a banka on the death of the poet’s
younger brother, in which he includes such affecting expressions as “my
younger brother and I, born of the same father and mother and close as a pair
of chopsticks” (9: 1804–6). As in Hitomaro’s banka, initial homey details
heighten the effect of the subsequent death, which once again is described
as being willed by the gods.
After Shōmu’s return to Nara in 745, the Heijō capital flourished. The
sovereign was himself a poet, and a chōka and ten tanka of his are preserved
in Man’yōshū. He abdicated in 749 in favor of his daughter Kōken (718–70).
This was a period of great cosmopolitanism, with the influence of Chinese
and Silk Road culture apparent in developments such as the construction of
Tōdaiji (Great Eastern Temple) to serve as the center of a network of state-
sponsored provincial temples (kokubunji). Added to the culture in these
years were Chinese pastimes like kemari (a genteel kickball game), sugoroku
(resembling backgammon), and go; various musical instruments; and foods
like glutinous rice and tea. The Shōsōin Imperial Repository, still standing
at Tōdaiji, reflects the elegance of the court at the time; many items in its
collection belonged to Emperor Shōmu and his consort Kōmyō. Their
daughter Kōken abdicated in 758 in favor of Junnin (733–65), who was
dominated by the Fujiwara, now led by Fujiwara no Nakamaro (706–64),
who in 764 rose in revolt against the power of the former empress. He was
suppressed and executed, and Kōken returned to the throne as Shōtoku,

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stronger than before. Such political upheaval underlay the brilliance of mid
eighth-century culture, including the deceptively pacific poetry of
Man’yōshū.
Tabito’s half-sister Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoue (c. 695–active until 750)
managed the Ōtomo house after her brother’s death, until his son
Yakamochi came of age. She had gone to Kyushu to aid Tabito after the
death of his wife and served as foster mother to Yakamochi, who would
eventually marry her eldest daughter. She is the best-represented female poet
in Man’yōshū, and third overall, with eighty-four poems. She was married
three times and many of her verses deal with love. Her longest poem
(3: 460–1, also the longest by any female poet in Man’yōshū) is a banka for a
Korean woman who had lived for decades with the Ōtomo. It employs the
old chōka manner, but it also reflects the diglossic versiprosa of the Kyushu
poetic circle of Okura and Tabito in its extended Chinese-style afterword,
thought to have been added by another hand. Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoue also
shares with Okura recognition of the parent–child bond, specifically between
herself and her two daughters. The elder of these, Yakamochi’s cousin and
eventual wife Ōtomo no Sakanoue no Ōiratsume (Elder Lady), left a sig-
nificant body of poetry herself, entirely devoted to love.
While the poems of the Kyushu poetic circle were the products of an elite
displaced into the western periphery, Man’yōshū also includes voices from the
opposite end of the country and the opposite end of the social scale, the
“songs of the eastland” (azuma-uta). They are collected in Book Fourteen and
grouped by province of origin; this is the only book in Man’yōshū in which
geography constitutes an organizing principle, though the standard genres of
zōka, banka, sōmon, and “metaphorical poems” (hiyuka) form the primary
armature. The book includes 230 verses (and eight complete variants), ninety
of whose geographical provenance within the eastland is known. Most are
love poems. The verses are all anonymous and tend to be declarative in form
and frank in expression, leading some scholars to assume the majority were
originally oral and to classify them as folk songs. But the azuma-uta are all
tanka and may therefore be the result of early cross-fertilization with courtly
poetry. Though these poems generally employ the same topics and rhetorical
approaches found in courtly tanka, they retain elements of local dialect. The
degree to which they were selected by a courtly editor from a wider sampling
is unknown, as is the extent to which they may have been revised to conform
to courtly norms. Their presence in Man’yōshū adds an exotic note to the
collection while at the same time demonstrating the ongoing centralization
of the country and the length of the imperial reach.

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Unusual though they are in many respects, the “songs of the eastland”
serve as a reminder of an important characteristic of Man’yōshū: nearly half of
its verse is anonymous. Its many hundreds of unattributed poems are con-
centrated in books in the middle of the anthology: Book Seven and Books
Ten through Fourteen. With a variety of organizational principles, including
the standard genres, topics (ordered in the manner of a Chinese classified
encyclopedia), the seasons, and (now-lost) source collections, and containing
mainly tanka (except for Book Thirteen, which collects chōka), this portion of
the Man’yōshū serves as a kind of nascent poetic encyclopedia, and as such is a
forerunner of compendious later works like the Heian period Kokin waka
rokujō.
Book Fourteen is followed by two other distinctive books. It appears that
before the addition of Yakamochi’s personal poetry collection, Man’yōshū
ended with Book Fifteen, with a version of what is now Book Sixteen added
as an appendix. Book Fifteen comprises two long poem-tales, one attributed
to Japanese envoys to the Korean kingdom of Silla, and the other to the exiled
Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover in the capital, Sano no Otogami (or
Chigami). Both are based on travel poetry in the context of love, composed
by men on compulsory journeys and by spouses who await their return.
The 145 Silla verses (15: 3578–3722) are represented as having been com-
posed or chanted in the context of an embassy that set out from the port of
Naniwa in 736 for the Silla capital and returned the following year. The poetic
account is devoted to travel sentiments of longing and homesickness. In that
it contains all the important Man’yōshū poetic forms (chōka, tanka, and
sedōka) and genres (sōmon, banka, and zōka), it constitutes a microcosm of
late Man’yōshū approaches to travel (except for pleasure). The sequence
begins with a number of parting exchanges in which the goal of a return to
home and wife by the end of autumn is set forth. As the subsequent journey
progresses, images of deepening autumn become objective correlatives, as it
were, for increasing frustration and longing for home. Like most later travel
literature, this is an account of the journey away; there is only a five-verse
coda that anticipates the arrival home. More than a dozen poets are identified
by name, and some of them are corroborated in other sources, a fact which
strongly suggests that some of the verses were indeed composed by members
of the mission. Much of the poetry is conventional, with analogues found in
other parts of the anthology, exhibiting the sense of communal creative
expression that was essential to the poetic life of this period. The organization
of the sequence also suggests that a later editor put it into its final form and
very likely added poems to improve its cohesion. But the practice of banquet

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composition, wherein several poets, often apparently in groups of four,

composed verses responding to and developing each other’s themes, would
also have naturally contributed interrelationships to the individual segments.
The second account of travel and longing in Book Fifteen (verses 3723–85),
attributed to the exiled courtier Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover Sano no
Otogami, comprises sixty-three tanka, arranged in four pairs of multiverse
exchanges between the man and the woman, plus a seven-verse coda. Like
the Silla sequence, it appears to have been based on historical realities; there
was an actual Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled to Echizen in early 739
for an unknown transgression and who was pardoned in 741. The Nakatomi-
Sano set constitutes a compendium of the conventions of courtly longing.
Here too the constituent parts of the sequence trace a temporal and spatial
progression, beginning with parting poetry exchanged between the lovers,
with the woman speaking first. The constituent verses often share imagery,
while exhibiting a larger temporal and spatial trajectory, anticipating the
principles of association and progression typical of later poetic anthologies.
Again the journey is away, though here most of the poetry is composed while
Yakamori is in exile in Echizen, rather than on the road.
Book Sixteen is the most anomalous in Man’yōshū, apparently having been
something of a catch-all appendix to the earlier fifteen-book version of the
anthology. Entitled “Poems with a Story and Miscellaneous Poems,” it
includes mostly anonymous verses that are notable for their popular, light,
or atypical qualities, thus anticipating, in a sense, the unorthodox haikai
poetry collected at the end of the later anthology Kokinshū. Here appear,
for example, the only extant “Buddha’s Footstone Poem” (16: 3885) in the
anthology and poems on the legend of the bamboo-cutter (16: 3791–3802),
familiar from an alternate version from the Heian period entitled Taketori
monogatari. Book Sixteen also includes examples of earlier poems placed into
new prose contexts (e.g. 16: 3804–5), a practice anticipating that of “poem-
tales” (utamonogatari) like Ise monogatari. Found in Book Sixteen as well are a
few songs by “beggar-minstrels” (hokaibito), who sang for their suppers. This
type of poem, the azuma-uta of Book Fourteen, and the verses by border
guards (sakimori) in Book Twenty (see below) are brief, unusual vignettes of
the non-courtly world, though subject to a considerable degree of later
editing.
The last four books of Man’yōshū come almost entirely from the personal
poetry collection of Ōtomo no Yakamochi, whose 479 extant verses make
him the best-represented Man’yōshū poet. The work of his youth is domi-
nated by exchanges with a variety of women, including not only his aunt’s

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daughter, whom he would later marry, but also Lady Kasa, who sent him
twenty-nine poems. The last four books of the anthology provide a detailed
view of courtly poetic life in the mid eighth century through his verse and
that of his associates. This was an age of continuing poetic experimentation,
of new themes and new techniques. But it was also a great age of banquet
verse, making up fully one third of these books. Here experimental creativity
and isolated melancholy could give way to communal poetic activity. By this
time basic poetic literacy was coming to be considered a defining character-
istic of the courtier. In such environments, originality coexisted with formula.
Yakamochi also turned his hand on occasion to public themes, such as a
paean to Yoshino (18: 4098–100) that again invokes the divine sovereign and
the courtiers who flock to his service at the palace there amid waters and
mountains. That set too was prepared in advance. Another was “On the
Discovery of Gold in Michinoku” (18: 4094–7), in which he quotes a tradi-
tional song of his house that a millennium and more later would be revived as
an encomium to patriotism and sacrifice in the Second World War.
But despite the importance of communal poetic presentation and appre-
hension to eighth-century poetic life, it is also true that by then Japanese poets
had developed a stronger sense of the individual poetic self, and that the
divisions between the gods, nature, and humankind were more clearly
sensed. The growth of literacy and written culture itself encouraged this
division. Another major factor was, of course, the assimilation of Chinese
prototypes. The best-known exemplar of this new sense of the individual was
Yakamochi, some of whose verses depict solitary reflection and a separation
from the older communal solidarity given bardic voice by Hitomaro scant
decades before. Yakamochi’s “three verses on springtime melancholy”
(19: 4290–2) are often adduced as examples of this new spirit, which was
likely influenced by Six Dynasties examples. The third is particularly well
known:
uraura ni On this spring day,
tereru haruhi ni beneath the mild sun,
hibari agari a lark starts up;
kokoroganashi mo how my heart aches,
hitori shi omoeba as I muse in solitude!
This was an age both of testing new poetic directions and of groping toward
universal poetic conventions, of communal stereotypicity in some cases, but
in others of inspired solitary creativity. In their sense of introspection and
bittersweet pathos (aware), such poems by Yakamochi are much closer to

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those of Kokinshū and the later imperial poetry collections than they are to
those of earlier Man’yōshū periods.
So too were poetic representations of nature and travel changing in the late
Man’yōshū years. Though there are some precursors in the early books of
Man’yōshū (e.g. Princess Nukata’s spring and autumn debate), poetry that
addresses seasonal beauty in itself and personal reactions to it are by and large
a characteristic of later Man’yōshū poets, notably Akahito, Yakamochi’s father
Tabito, and particularly Yakamochi himself. Nearly half of his oeuvre
includes seasonal elements. The new attitude to nature coincided with the
increasing weight of Chinese models and also with the rising popularity of
poetic banquets in the late Man’yōshū period, in which poets might “compose
on things” and treat a seasonal element not necessarily as something experi-
enced at the moment, but rather as an aestheticized ideal.
This new sense of nature as aesthetic vista rather than as ineffable divine
mystery, seen earlier in Mushimaro’s poems on Mount Tsukuba, is expressed
particularly well in verses exchanged by Yakamochi and his kinsman Ōtomo
no Ikenushi about an excursion to a lake in the province where Yakamochi
was currently serving as governor. Yakamochi sent an opening chōka, which
he called a fu in the Chinese manner, and Ikenushi harmonized with his own
(17: 3993–4), responding to Yakamochi’s chinoiserie by referring to the hanka
of his chōka as a jueju, the four-line regulated Chinese verse form. The poem
is carefully organized into two parts, a forty-eight-ku main section and a nine-
ku conclusion. The main section is subdivided with precision into three
sixteen-ku parts of two eight-ku portions each (perhaps reflecting the eight
lines of Chinese lüshi regulated verse), consisting of introduction, narrative en
route, and narrative at the lake. The last three eight-ku segments are all
marked by place names at or near where they begin, but makurakotoba are
deemphasized. While there may be lingering elements of praise here for local
deities, the main purpose is to describe with literary sophistication a journey
undertaken to enjoy the landscape. It has been suggested that in such
exchanges Yakamochi and Ikenushi were attempting to inject new creative
life into the flagging chōka genre. Clearly not all travel in Man’yōshū was
melancholy and coerced.
And yet Yakamochi also preserved in his personal poetry collection exam-
ples of travel that was unquestionably involuntary and sad; these are the verses
by border guards (sakimori), men aged twenty through fifty-nine who were
conscripted for three-year tours to guard north Kyushu and the islands of Oki
and Tsushima. Originally instituted to defend Japan from counterattack after
the defeat of Paekche and its ally Japan by the united armies of Silla and the

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Tang in 663, in its heyday the system included two to three thousand guards,
mostly from the eastern provinces. Book Twenty (20: 4321–4436) includes 116
border-guard verses (there are a handful in other books). Taking advantage of
his office as assistant vice minister for war, Yakamochi collected eighty-four of
these verses (eighty-three tanka and one chōka) from 755 together with nine
tanka from previous years, adding one by another imperial official. As was
typical of the practice of his father’s Kyushu circle, he added twenty-two verses
on border-guard themes he had written himself, some even in a guard’s
persona. The original poems constitute the largest group in the entire anthol-
ogy by named members of the periphery. But their inclusion again reflects the
growing influence of the imperial center, and Yakamochi was selective, reject-
ing what he considered “inferior” attempts. While the metrical regularity of
five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables in these poems strongly suggests
courtly influence and editorial reworking, some border-guard poems retain
elements of eastern dialect, like the azuma-uta. Twenty-four of the border-
guard poems mention parents and children, and thirteen others, home and
family. Yakamochi’s inclusion of the sakimori verses, along with his own
imitations, suggests an affinity with the fictive invention, social consciousness,
and family concerns of his father’s colleague Yamanoue no Okura.
Yakamochi’s poetic activity is emblematic of this formative and volatile
period of Japanese letters. On the one hand, it exemplies the increasing
emphasis on the inner life of the individual poet and on new and original
ways of expressing it in verse; on the other, it demonstrates a simultaneous
awareness of a growing alienation of the individual from human community
and separation from the natural environment. And yet such poems were
often presented in communal banquets. While assimilating lessons from
Chinese verse forms, Yakamochi simultaneously lamented the decline of
the native chōka and became its last important practitioner.

Ontogeny and reception

Yakamochi is central to the history of Man’yōshū not only for the unparalleled
number of his poems that it includes and the new directions they adumbrate,
but also for his probable role in overseeing work on the anthology as it
survives today. The largest division in the final version of Man’yōshū is
between the first sixteen books (the “old collection”), which contain poetry
through 744, and the last four books (the “new collection”), largely
Yakamochi’s personal poetry collection and mostly dating from 746–59. As
noted above, the anthology is believed to have originally consisted only of

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the first fifty-three verses of Book One, which include the imperial reign of
Yūryaku and then the six reigns of Jomei and successors. That kernel collec-
tion may have been compiled in about 695–703, a period that overlaps with
the Fujiwara capital and the retirement of the female sovereign Jitō. The
introductory fifty-three poems have also been referred to for this reason as
the “Fujiwara Palace Man’yōshū” or as the “Jitō Man’yōshū.” In that Hitomaro
was the premier poet of that age, he could have been involved in that project.
The rest of Book One was probably added in about 712–20, just after the move
to Nara. It was evidently intended early on to be augmented by a second
book, as it includes only zōka, leaving the sōmon and banka for Book Two.
Like Book One, Book Two begins with a figure from the distant past
(Iwanohime) then jumps to the time of Tenji. Itō Haku, the most influential
modern theorizer about the anthology’s origins, believed that while the ur-
Man’yōshū was probably undertaken with the support of Retired Empress
Jitō, the two-book expansion was likely sponsored by her half-sister, Retired
Empress Genmei.3 This second phase of the collection is therefore sometimes
called the “Genmei Man’yōshū.” Books Three and Four are also a companion
set, the former including zōka, banka, and hiyuka, and the latter sōmon.
Again, they both begin with figures from the distant past, then jump to more
contemporary poetry, and they were probably originally compiled in about
724, the year Genshō retired and Shōmu succeeded. They were later
expanded, perhaps by Shōmu’s court poets Kasa no Kanamura and Yamabe
no Akahito.
In the hands of Yakamochi and his colleagues, Books Three and Four
became a collection of old and new, and the poetry in Books One and Two,
which when first compiled was seen as relatively recent and in part even
modern, was now viewed as old and almost classical, worthy of reverence if
not emulation. Books Five and Six then followed with poetry from the mid-
Nara period. (Book Five may have been based on a late poetic collection of
Yamanoue no Okura.) As mentioned above, Books Seven through Twelve
prominently feature excerpts from another earlier collection now lost,
Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro kashū, a work perhaps compiled by
Hitomaro of poetry by himself and others, with later additions. Those
books were then augmented by Books Thirteen through Fifteen together
with the prototype of an appendix in about 745, a half-century or so after the
ur-Man’yōshū was begun.
3
Itō Haku, “Man’yōshū no oitachi (1),” in Man’yōshū, vol. 1, ed. Itō et al. (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1976), 389.

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Though Yakamochi was probably the central figure in the later antholo-
gization process, others, such as Prince Ichihara and Lady Ōtomo no
Sakanoue, may also have been involved. The fifteen-book Man’yōshū is
sometimes referred to as the “Genshō Man’yōshū” to reflect the surmised
role of the retired sovereign Genshō in fostering its compilation. Yakamochi’s
patron Tachibana no Moroe may at some point have been involved as well,
for Eiga monogatari (A Tale of Flowering Fortunes), written in the mid-Heian
period, holds that Moroe and others were ordered to undertake the task by
yet another female sovereign, Shōmu’s daughter Kōken. The appendix may
have been completed in about 767–80 and then turned into Book Sixteen
when the twenty-book Man’yōshū was compiled. The four-book “new collec-
tion,” containing more than six hundred verses from 730 to 759, was, as
already pointed out, largely constructed from Yakamochi’s personal poetry
collection from 746–59. The first thirty-two poems, though, date from 730–44
and may have come from the collection of his late brother Fumimochi. The
early Heian period Emperor Heizei (774–824) afforded the work official
recognition, and it was perhaps in his reign, c. 806–10, that a few more
poems were added and the whole was fair-copied. This is the source of
another legend that Man’yōshū was Emperor Heizei’s creation. In view of
Heizei’s involvement and the presumed support provided by various pre-
vious monarchs, it has even been argued that Man’yōshū, and not Kokinshū,
was the first imperially sponsored waka anthology.
The tables of contents (mokuroku) of the final books may not have been
completed until the mid tenth century, when some of the work had already
become difficult to read, due to sweeping simplifications in the vernacular
writing system. Those last tables of contents may have been added in about
951–67 by the “Five Gentlemen of the Pear Chamber” (Nashitsubo no Gonin),
who also provided readings for about four thousand of the tanka in the
collection. Their readings are referred to today as the “old annotations”
(koten). This renewed interest in the anthology inspired further scholarship,
the “next annotations” (jiten), by subsequent generations of poets, who
established about three hundred more readings. Man’yōshū was also studied
by the members of the major poetic houses that began to develop in the latter
part of the Heian period, though they disagreed about how it should be used
in new poetic composition. The scholar monk Sengaku (b. 1203) collated and
edited the text, supplying readings for the last 150 hitherto undeciphered
poems (the “new annotations” or shinten); his Man’yōshū chūshaku (Man’yōshū
Commentary, 1269) marked a new era in Man’yōshū studies. Sengaku’s
contribution provided the foundation for subsequent commentaries by

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medieval monks, courtiers, and linked verse poets, and then for the epochal
study by Keichū (1640–1701) entitled Man’yō daishōki (A Substitute’s Notes on
Man’yōshū), which achieved its final form in 1690, during the Genroku
efflorescence of Edo culture. Keichū’s teachings became the bedrock of
subsequent studies by nativist scholars who returned to Man’yōshū as a
basic text for exploring the roots of vernacular literature and the essence of
native Japanese culture. But due to the vagaries of the various writing
systems used in the anthology, a few of its verses still resist definitive readings
today.
Man’yōshū was born of the intersection between, on the one hand, native
song and ritual and, on the other, Chinese script, poetry, and ideas about the
political role of literature. Some Man’yōshū verses are simple lyric declara-
tions, and others are paeans to the sovereign. But the anthology reveals a
complex developmental process that also generated works of fictive imagina-
tion, philosophical exegesis, and subtle interiority, through an extended
dialogue with Chinese models. It contains a wider social cross-section than
seen in later imperial collections (however much its verses from the periph-
ery were reshaped by later editors). But despite the appearance here and
there of such popular voices, Man’yōshū took initial shape as a showcase of
imperial literary culture, and the vast majority of its poetry is of courtly
origin. After its completion, it remained the preserve of courtiers and the
educated elite; though printing increased its circulation and it began to be
taught in Edo academies, it was only in the twentieth century that the general
population became aware of it. The characterization of Man’yōshū as a text
that was widely read through the centuries is a modern myth.

85
 6
Anthologization and Sino-Japanese
literature: Kaifūsō and the three imperial
anthologies
wiebke denecke

In contrast to Western antiquity, poetry anthologies have been a prominent

form of literary production in East Asia. They were a fitting format to
accommodate relatively short poetic genres, give space to a variety of voices,
and thus represent courts, eras, and the state of the literary art. The Shijing
(600 BCE), which unlike all later poetry collections is considered a “Classic,”
embodies crucial elements of the ideology of anthology-making: a compiler
figure related to a center of power; the assumption of an implicit political,
ethical, or aesthetic agenda embodied in the anthology’s arrangement
scheme; and the presentation of a “literary map,” which commemorated
and exemplified particular traditions, and thematized societal values.
This ideology of anthologization fit the needs of the early Japanese state.
Claiming a nexus between literary production and virtuous rule allowed the
elites to highlight their power in the form of courtly anthologies for moral
and political edification, and for refined entertainment. In China courts were
the central sites of poetic production until the eighth century, when many
poets began to write from other vantage points. But in Japan the tradition of
imperial anthologies, prefigured by the eighth-century Kaifūsō, was pioneered
by the three ninth-century kanshi anthologies and continued in the line of
twenty-one imperial waka anthologies from the Kokinwakashū into the
fifteenth century.
Kaifūsō (751) is a collection of 120 predominantly pentasyllabic poems by
sixty-four authors, including imperial family members, court officials, and
monks. Most poems come from poetry banquets or outings, such as seasonal
festivals, banquets for Silla embassies, excursions to Yoshino, or the Rites for
Confucius (sekiten). The title, “Florilegium of Cherished Airs” is program-
matic: kaifū (“cherished airs”) looks to preserve the poetic production since
Tenji’s court at Ōmi (661–72), and sō, a waterplant associated with elegant

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writing, lays bold claim to literary sophistication. With its chronological

arrangement and its inclusion of biographies for the imperial family (and
monks), Kaifūsō is a kind of poetic chronicle of eight decades of state building,
from Tenji’s first poetry banquets, through the destructive Jinshin War
during which his son Prince Ōtomo was ousted by Tenji’s brother Tenmu
in 672, up until the reign of the strong-willed Empress Kōken, whose lineage
combined descent from Tenji, Tenmu, and the Fujiwara ancestor Nakatomi
no Kamatari. Several influential court officials, most notably Fujiwara no
Fuhito, feature in the anthology. Because the compiler shows unmistakable
sympathy for the historical losers, Prince Ōtomo and the Ōmi court, scholars
since the Edo period have believed that one of Ōtomo’s descendants, Ōmi no
Mifune, compiled the anthology. Yet the abundance of poetry from the
literary salon of Tenmu’s grandson Prince Nagaya has inspired a host of
alternative speculations.
Although it is questionable how widely the anthology circulated in its first
centuries (all extant copies stem from a 1041 manuscript), Kaifūsō is of premier
significance for understanding the beginnings of literature in Japan. As the
first poetry anthology in a secondary literary culture, which eagerly strove to
emulate its reference culture, China, it shows a keen historical consciousness.
The preface plots the rise of kanshi onto a broad timeline of civilization (bun)
from the Age of the Gods and legendary beginnings under Emperor Jimmu,
through the arrival of diplomatic writing and Confucian books from Korea
and the establishment of ranks under Prince Shōtoku, climaxing with
Emperor Tenji’s founding of an academy and hosting of poetry banquets.
Though modeled on the preface to Wenxuan (J. Monzen), Japan’s earliest
account of literary history tells a story staked on Japanese ground.
Just as medieval Chinese models of literary history, enhanced by Japan’s early
chronicles, allowed the Kaifūsō compiler to design a history of kanshi, medieval
Chinese poetry provided a rich treasury of sophisticated diction. No early
Chinese ruler could have written the couplet Emperor Monmu (r. 697–707)
crafted on “moon”:
Its liquid luster shines on the terrace
as its departing wheel sinks into the wine cup. (Kaifūsō 15)

Only the practiced observation and poetic obsession with surfaces in Six
Dynasties poetry allowed the Japanese emperor to set the vastness of moon-
light on the smooth surface of a large terrace against the glimmering speck of
moon reflected in the poet’s wine cup.

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Because of their temporal overlap Kaifūsō and Man’yōshū constitute an

extraordinary testing ground for the emergence of Japan’s biliterate literary
culture. Despite much valuable research tracing the mutual influence of
particular imagery and tropes or comparing poems by authors anthologized
in both, a broader understanding of how and to which effect Japan, of all East
Asian cultures, developed from the outset such a robustly biliterate tradition
is needed. If anything, Kaifūsō has been the Man’yōshū’s neglected twin,
disparaged as a novice collection; its historical value is conceded but its
literary worth denigrated, and what in Man’yōshū appears primeval and
vigorous is considered primitive and imitative in Kaifūsō. Most scholars
criticize its egregious disregard for the tonal rules of Chinese “regulated
poetry,” rather than appreciating the poets’ passionate practice of parallel
couplets; or they detect cases of “plagiarism” rather than understanding the
lifting of lines from Chinese “originals” as in principle little different from the
extensive borrowing of Chinese diction that characterizes early Sino-Japanese
literature as a whole.
Sixty years after Kaifūsō, Emperor Saga and his successor Junna, both sons
of Emperor Kanmu, the founder of the Heian capital, commissioned three
imperial anthologies in a short period of thirteen years: Ryōunshū (Cloud-
Topping Collection, 814), Bunka shūreishū (Collection of Exquisite Literary
Flourish, 818), and Keikokushū (Collection for Ordering the State, 827). Saga
vigorously promoted literature. His policies enabled an unprecedented flour-
ishing of the State Academy; he increased the occasions for public poetry
composition by reviving or establishing annual festivals such as the “Flower
Banquet” (hana no en), the “Palace Banquet” (naien), and the “Double-Ninth”
Chrysanthemum Festival; in addition to the anthologies he commissioned a
new family register, a ritual code, and an official history. His own poetry fills
a fifth of the anthologies, and he gathered an impressive salon of poet-
officials, a number of whom helped compile the anthologies. His enthusiasm
for kanshi is also evident in the support for his daughter Princess Uchiko, the
first Kamo priestess and one of the rare female Heian kanshi poets, who
features in Keikokushū.
The first two anthologies have a narrower scope: Ryōunshū includes kanshi
from the past three decades, while Bunka shūreishū only has poetry from the
four years since Ryōunshū. Keikokushū, unfortunately only partially preserved,
gives a panorama of more than a century of literary production and is most
ambitious in its sheer volume and its unprecedented inclusion of prose genres
such as rhapsodies, poetry prefaces, and examination essays. Unlike existing
Tang anthologies, which mostly go by authors, Saga’s compilers eagerly

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experimented with arrangement schemes: by official rank (Ryōunshū), topic

category (Bunka shūreishū), or genre (Keikokushū).
Although there is much implicit continuity with Kaifūsō the Saga antholo-
gies constituted a groundbreaking step in literary history. They were the first
imperial anthologies, and the nostalgia for the tragic Ōmi court that hovered
over Kaifūsō gave way to a proud exaltation of the present era’s splendors.
They propagate the ideology that “Literature (bunshō) is the great affair in
ordering the state,” in the words of Cao Pi’s (Emperor Wen of Wei’s)
“Treatise on Literature,” which open the Ryōunshū preface and gave name
to the Keikokushū; Saga received private lectures on Wenxuan, which con-
tained the treatise and poetry from the Cao family salon and might explain
the manifold references to the Cao court. Just as Cao Pi’s treatise pioneered
literature as a personal, immortal achievement and a realm distinct from
politics, while also heralding the traditional nexus between politics and
literature, the Saga anthologies evoked that courtly theme but claimed a
new, “modern” (kindai) aesthetic autonomy. This enhanced historical aware-
ness applied also to Chinese literature, whose history was for the first time
sketched in the Keikokushū preface. This resonated with literature’s spatial
expansion during the Saga period. Poetry was increasingly composed beyond
the confines of the palace, at the Shinsen’en Garden or southwest of the
capital at Kaya, a detached palace for hunting excursions named after
Heyang, a pleasure spot outside of Luoyang associated with the poet Pan
Yue. Instead of entering the realm of the immortals, as Kaifūsō poets had done
on excursions to Yoshino, Saga and his courtiers discovered rustic charms at
Kaya: the babble of simple folk, noisy monkeys, and a sometimes inconve-
nient, but palpable, nature.
The early Sino-Japanese anthologies represent the foundations of court
poetry in Japan and show the importance of kanshi both as a domestic and
cross-cultural medium of communication and entertainment. Court poetry is
not just poetry produced at court. It had its characteristic sites and occasions,
topics and themes, and typical set of participants; it was supported by socio-
political institutions and an ideology that gave literature a prominent place in
the political realm; and it produced an anti-court rhetoric that counterba-
lanced its social strictures and could mediate a poet’s career-related
disappointments.
As in medieval China up to the eighth century, court banquets were a
generative site of poetry in early Japan. They were mostly held in the palace,
at mansions of the aristocracy or at detached palaces beyond the capital on
the occasion of excursions, seasonal festivals or Academy-related events.

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They produced collective poetry on set topics, which, increasingly in the Saga
anthologies, included rhyme-matching. This engendered a rich vocabulary of
sophisticated judgment of the natural world and human emotions. Typically
banquets included various “subjects” and the emperor, who had a dual role as
sovereign worthy of panegyric praise for his civil virtues and erudition, and
also as imaginary equal to his poet-courtiers. This role-play was pronounced
in Saga’s salon and might have encouraged the popularity of certain fictional
scenarios that bore little relation to Heian realities: the Chinese “border
poem” lamenting bleak frontier wars, “boudoir laments,” and the “pining
wife poem” allowing male poets to write in a female voice about the pains of
separation.
The main institutions that shaped early kanshi production were the court
bureaucracy and the State Academy. Many poets remained middle-ranking
officials, but the ideology of literature articulated in the prefaces to the Sino-
Japanese anthologies gave their poetry a central place in the “ordering of the
state.” This disjunction between cultural and political capital experienced by
scholar-officials became ever more prominent in the following centuries, as is
evident in Honchō monzui (The Literary Essence of Our Court).
The rhetoric of imperial praise also engendered a poetic embracing of
escape and reclusion. True, we occasionally find genuine anti-court poems by
poets who were indeed exiled (e.g. Isonokami no Otomaro). But the pose of
reclusion was overwhelmingly more common than its reality. It came in
several guises: in the Kaifūsō the exuberant rejection of society in Taoist guise,
inspired by the unrestrained world of the third-century Seven Sages of the
Bamboo Grove, is popular. The Saga anthologies repeatedly invoke the trope
of Confucian recluses, whom the ruler finds in the wilderness and draws as
brilliant officials to his court. The rhetoric of reclusion was paradoxical
because the world of recluses and immortals could be portrayed as opposed
to but also superposed with the court. This function of the reclusion topic
becomes most obvious in lines by Kuwahara no Haraka:
We’ve climbed high, yet are not beyond the human world:
both officials and recluses at once. (Ryōunshū 90)

Reclusion tropes could even turn erotic, as when Ono no Minemori describes
a Double-Ninth Festival bringing together beautiful women and recluses
(Ryōunshū 49).
Despite a strongly emulative relation to Chinese poetry, Japanese poets
adapted the medium to their own needs. They coined expressions that are
not attested in contemporary Chinese sources. The distinctive connections

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between the court, reclusion, the world of immortals, and romantic love in
early Sino-Japanese anthologies are still little explored. If Chinese boudoir
laments were usually written by male poets in the female voice, in early
Japan, where vernacular poetry allowed communication between the sexes, a
man could write a “boudoir lament” about himself (Kaifūsō 118) and a woman
could write one for herself (Bunka shūreishū 50, 55).
The early Sino-Japanese anthologies also highlight kanshi as a trans-
national skill and a medium of cross-cultural communication. Many of the
poet-officials in the Kaifūsō who were associated with the State Academy
came from Korean immigrant lineages. The anthologies feature poetry
written by Japanese on embassies to China, by Japanese when hosting Silla
envoys, or even by a Parhae envoy visiting Japan. However, such poems are
few: eighth- and ninth-century kanshi composition was not a sporadic trans-
national skill but a solid practice predominantly put to domestic purposes.
The early Sino-Japanese anthologies have a long history of neglect. Unlike
vernacular collections that explicitly harked back to the Man’yōshū, the Saga
anthologies make no explicit reference to Kaifūsō; in the Edo period Emura
Hokkai’s kanshi history (Nihon shishi, 1770) skims over both; and modern
scholarship has been scarce, because they had become “foreign literature”
outside of the mainstream national literature paradigm. In general, the
Kaifūsō, as a product of the “Man’yō Age,” fares a bit better. The Saga
anthologies suffer as products of what has been called in the wake of
Kojima Noriyuki, ironically their most passionate scholar, the “Dark Age of
National Poetry,” when kanshibun thrived amid a relative scarcity of waka.1
But the fact that explicit tradition building is so weak in the Sino-Japanese
tradition, which is episodic and eclectic rather than continuous and self-
conscious, should not overshadow the fundamental importance of the early
Sino-Japanese anthologies for Japanese literary culture.

1
Kokufū ankoku jidai no bungaku, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1968–98).

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 part ii
*

THE HEIAN PERIOD (794–1185)

 7
Introduction: court culture, women, and
the rise of vernacular literature
haruo shirane

In the four hundred years from the end of the eighth century to the end of the
twelfth century, the center of political power was located in the Heian capital
(today known as Kyoto), from which the period takes its name. The political
origin of the Heian period can be traced to 781, when Emperor Kanmu
(r. 781–806) ascended the throne. Three years later (in 784), he moved the
capital from Heijō (Nara) about thirty kilometers northwest, to Nagaoka, and
then in 794 to Heian, nearby to the northeast of Nagaoka. The end of the
Heian period is usually considered to be 1185, when the Taira (Heike), a
military clan, was demolished and Minamoto Yoritomo (1147–99), the leader
of the Minamoto (Genji) military clan, established the Kamakura bakufu
(military government) in eastern Japan.
At the end of the eighth century, the aristocratic clans that had controlled
the ritsuryō state during the Nara period were gradually supplanted. By
the mid ninth century the ranks of the nobility (kugyō) were dominated
by the Fujiwara and Minamoto (Genji). Among them, the northern branch
of the Fujiwara eventually prevailed, and in the mid-Heian period, beginning
in the latter half of the tenth century, controlled the throne through the
sekkan (regent) system. By marrying their daughters to emperors, the
Fujiwara became the grandfathers of future emperors, placing them in the
position to be regents who ruled in place of the child emperor. A parallel
office gave them similar privileges during the reigns of adult emperors.
During the late ninth century, Emperor Uda (r. 887–97), with the aid of
Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), managed to hold off the Fujiwara. Uda’s
son Emperor Daigo (r. 897–930), with the assistance of Michizane and the
minister of the left, Fujiwara no Tokihira, similarly attempted to restore
direct imperial rule. To enhance the authority of the imperial family,
Emperor Daigo ordered the compilation of the Kokin wakashū (or
Kokinshū; Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems, c. 905–14), the first
imperial anthology of native poetry (the thirty-one-syllable waka). Although

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the attempt at imperial restoration by Uda and Daigo ultimately failed, the
Uda/Daigo reigns – often referred to as the Engi (901–23) era – were
subsequently considered to be a golden age of imperial rule and cultural
efflorescence.
Emperor Daigo and his son, Murakami (r. 946–67), managed to avoid
Fujiwara regents, but their imperial successors were not so successful. In
967, with the accession of Emperor Reizei, Fujiwara no Saneyori became
regent, leading to the institutionalization of the Fujiwara regency, which
peaked between 995 and 1027, when Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), the
most powerful and successful regent, held sway. Michinaga’s eldest daughter,
Shōshi, became the empress and consort of Emperor Ichijō (r. 986–1011) and
gave birth to two subsequent emperors, GoIchijō and GoSuzaku. Murasaki
Shikibu probably wrote much of the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji)
while serving as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi, while Sei Shōnagon, the
author of Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book), was a lady-in-waiting to
Empress Teishi, another consort of Emperor Ichijō and Shōshi’s rival.
In the second half of the eleventh century, with the accession of Emperor
GoSanjō (r. 1068–72) – who, for the first time in the 170 years since Emperor
Uda’s reign, did not have Fujiwara maternal relatives – the power of the
Fujiwara regency suddenly declined. The retired emperor, Shirakawa
(1053–1129, r. 1072–86), who relinquished the throne in 1086, established the
insei system, in which the retired/cloistered emperor controlled the emperor
(usually a child) and held political power from behind the throne. Retired
Emperor Shirakawa, who took holy vows in 1096, thus held control for forty-
three years through three imperial reigns.
The eighth-century ritsuryō state system – with its system of ranks,
ministries, and university – continued to operate, at least in name, through-
out the Heian period and provided the framework for a court-based state
system, which emerged at the beginning of the tenth century. One of the
major characteristics of this court-based state was gradual concentration of
power outside the capital in the provincial governors (zuryō), drawn from
middle-rank aristocrats, who were the fathers of women writers of this
period. Consequently, the central government in the capital, while making
official appointments to and receiving tributes from the periphery, gradually
lost direct administrative control of the provinces. The result was increasing
disorder. In 939 two rebellions took place – one led by Taira no Masakado
(d. 940) and another by Fujiwara no Sumitomo – both of which were
subdued. Meanwhile, the provincial governors, exploiting their positions as
state appointees, gathered more and more wealth and power.

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 Introduction: court culture, women, and the rise of vernacular literature

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the ritsuryō state system had been
largely replaced by a system of private estates (shōen), which became the
foundation for a new, village-based provincial society. The samurai, who
played new roles of coercion and defense in this system, gained military
strength, and by the latter half of the twelfth century the Taira (Heike), a
military clan, came into conflict with the retired emperors, who until then
had controlled the throne. The Taira clan took over the reins of the court
government until they were in turn toppled by the Minamoto (Genji), a
military clan based in the east, in Kamakura, thereby bringing an end to the
Heian period and ushering in the medieval period.
The early Heian period was marked by the continued prominence of
Chinese-based literature and culture and the gradual introduction of verna-
cular cultural forms, particularly the court-based vernacular literature writ-
ten in kana, a new syllabary, which flourished from the tenth century
onward. An example of Chinese-based literature is Nihon ryōiki (Record of
Miraculous Events in Japan, c. 787–824) by the priest Kyōkai (also Keikai),
which was written in Literary Sinitic but which gives both a Buddhist and a
commoner’s view of the world. The most famous writer in this period was
Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), a statesman known for his writings in both
kanshi (Chinese poetry) and kanbun (Chinese prose). Michizane, who rose to
the pinnacle of power before abruptly falling, wrote on topics (student days,
professional career, intellectual world, exile) that differed significantly from
those found in the later kana writing by women. Chinese poetry and Chinese
prose (belles lettres), written almost entirely by male aristocrats, continued to
be important throughout the Heian period, and culminated in the Honchō
monzui (Literary Essence of Our Court, compiled by Fujiwara no Akihira,
c. 989–1066), a repository of model pieces featuring genres that an educated
Heian man needed to master to participate in court life, perform duties
within the court bureaucracy, or draft texts for patrons of religious
ceremonies.
The rise in popularity of kana writing in the late ninth century, particularly
in the form of waka, the thirty-one-syllable classical poem (written by aristo-
crats in an urban environment), gave birth to a variety of vernacular litera-
ture in the tenth century. Waka became integral to the everyday life of the
aristocracy, functioning as a form of elevated dialogue and a major means of
communication between the sexes. These poems also became an important
part of public life, particularly at banquets where composition of poetry in
Japanese or Chinese was required. The first three imperial waka anthologies,
particularly the first one, the Kokinshū, became the foundation (in both

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diction and thematic content) for subsequent court literature. The close
relationship between Chinese poetry (kanshi) and Japanese classical poetry
(waka), which became the twin pillars of high literature, is apparent in the
Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing, early
eleventh century), edited by Fujiwara Kintō (966–1041), the leading man of
letters of his day and a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, in which excerpts
of Chinese poetry are followed by Japanese poetry on the same topic.
Private waka collections, which included exchanges between the poet and
his or her acquaintances, also led to a variety of new genres: (1) poetic travel
diaries, such as the Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary) by Ki no Tsurayuki; (2) confes-
sional, semi-autobiographical poetic diaries by women, like the Kagerō nikki
(Kagerō Diary) by the mother of Fujiwara no Michitsuna and the Sarashina
nikki (Sarashina Diary) by the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue; and (3)
poem-tales (uta-monogatari) centering on the poetry of a particular poet, of
which the most famous example is the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise),
initially based on the poetry of Ariwara no Narihira (825–80), the implicit
protagonist. Poetry also became a key part of vernacular fiction, which is
generally thought to begin with Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo
Cutter, c. 909) and The Tales of Ise.
The second major period of Heian kana literature, from the latter half of the
tenth century through the first half of the eleventh century, can be said to start
with the Kagerō Diary, by the mother of Michitsuna, written in the 970s and
marking the beginning of major vernacular prose writings by women. The
peak of this period comes with the reign of Emperor Ichijō (986–1011), during
which Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, The Tale of Genji, and the Izumi Shikibu
nikki (Izumi Shikibu Diary) were written. Although there were important
women writers in the ancient period such as Princess Nukata, Lady
Sakanoue, and Lady Kasa, all poets represented in the Man’yōshū, they did
not have the concentration and influence of those in the mid-Heian period.
One of the striking characteristics of the emergence of Japanese vernacular
literature was the central role played by women writers who were closely
associated with the imperial court in the late tenth and early eleventh
centuries, such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, the mother of
Michitsuna, Izumi Shikibu, and the daughter of Takasue. Kana, the verna-
cular syllabary, became prominent in the early tenth century, enabling the
Japanese to write more easily in their own language. Until then, writing had
been in Literary Sinitic (as in the Nihon shoki) or had used Chinese characters
to transcribe the native Japanese language (as in parts of the Man’yōshū).
Despite the emergence of a native syllabary, the male nobility continued to

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 Introduction: court culture, women, and the rise of vernacular literature

rely on Literary Sinitic, which remained the more prestigious language and
the language of government, scholarship, and religion. By contrast, aristo-
cratic women, who were generally relegated to a more private sphere,
adopted the native syllabary and used it to write diaries, memoirs, poetry,
and fiction.
The second reason for the development of women’s writing was the
political, social, and cultural importance of the ladies-in-waiting at the imperial
court. The leading Fujiwara families poured their resources into the residences
and entourages of their daughters, who competed for the attention of the
emperor. Indeed, ladies-in-waiting to Fujiwara daughters wrote much of
the vernacular literature of the mid-Heian period. These ladies-in-waiting
were the daughters of provincial governors, mid-level aristocrats who were
frequently in unstable political and economic positions. Having failed to rise in
the court hierarchy, many of these provincial governors went to the provinces
to make a living and so had an outsider’s perspective on court life. One
consequence was that the literature written by women at court paid homage
to powerful Fujiwara patrons (as in the Pillow Book and the Murasaki Shikibu
Diary) while also expressing deep disillusionment with court life (as in the
Sarashina Diary) and with the marital customs that supported this sociopolitical
system (as in the Kagerō Diary). Part of the complexity of The Tale of Genji, in
fact, comes from this conflicting view of court culture and power.
The thirty-one-syllable classical poem (waka) emerged as the most impor-
tant vernacular (kana) genre. Subjects of these poems ranged from the
seasons to love to miscellaneous topics such as celebration, mourning,
separation, and travel, which form separate books in the Kokinshū. Poems
were composed for public functions, at poetry matches (uta-awase) and
parties, and for illustrated screens (byōbu uta), which were commissioned
by royalty and powerful Fujiwara families. Waka functioned privately as a
social medium for greetings, courtship, and farewells, as well as a means of
self-reflection. Poets also edited private collections, of either their own poetry
or that of other poets like Ariwara no Narihira or Ono no Komachi. These
private poetry collections could take the form of a travel diary, as in the Tosa
Diary, one of the first diaries written in kana, or the beginning of the Sarashina
Diary. Poetry collections could also lead to confessional autobiographies like
the Kagerō Diary, which probably began as a private collection of poems by
Michitsuna’s mother. Private collections of poetry also gave rise to the poem-
tale, which contained anecdotes about poems that were compiled to create a
biographical narrative in works like The Tales of Ise, itself based on the poems
and legends surrounding Ariwara Narihira.

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In Murasaki Shikibu’s day, as in previous centuries, men wrote prose in

Literary Sinitic, the official language of religion, scholarship, and govern-
ment. In the tenth century, therefore, vernacular prose, particularly literary
diaries, was associated with women to the extent that, in the Tosa Diary, the
leading male poet of the day, Ki no Tsurayuki, assumed the persona of a
woman in writing a literary diary in Japanese. Male scholars, however, were
the first to write vernacular tales, or monogatari, although they did so
anonymously, for such writing was considered a lowly activity. These early
vernacular tales, which began with The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (early tenth
century), tend to be highly romantic and fantastical. Women, by contrast,
tended to write personal, confessional literature based on their private lives
and centered on their own poetry. The author of the Kagerō Diary, the first
major literary diary by a woman, wrote out of a profound dissatisfaction with
contemporary monogatari, which, in her view, were “little more than gross
fabrications.” Murasaki Shikibu was able to combine both traditions. The Tale
of Genji carries on the earlier monogatari tradition in its larger plot and in its
amorous hero, who echoes the earlier Narihira of The Tales of Ise. But in its
style, details, psychological insight, and portrayal of the dilemmas faced by
women in aristocratic society, The Tale of Genji remains firmly rooted in the
women’s writing tradition.
With the decline of the northern branch of the Fujiwara clan and the
Fujiwara regency in the late eleventh century, women’s literature (produced
by ladies-in-waiting at court) began to wane. Instead, a nostalgic literature
emerged that looked back to the glory of the past. The first major example is
Eiga monogatari (Tales of Flowering Fortunes, c. early twelfth century), a
historical tale attributed to a woman, which looks back at Fujiwara no
Michinaga (966–1027), who brought the regency to its peak. Tales of
Flowering Fortunes was quickly followed by the “mirror pieces” (kagami-
mono), a series of historical chronicles written in Japanese, beginning with
Ōkagami (The Great Mirror, c. twelfth century), which also recounted
Michinaga’s achievements.
The late Heian period was also marked by the emergence of setsuwa
(anecdote) collections, the first of which was the massive Konjaku monogatari
shū (Tales of Times Now Past, c. 1120), which reflected the heavy influence of
Pure Land Buddhism, incorporated stories of rebirth in the Pure Land, and
depicted the life of commoners in the provinces. Tales of Times Now Past,
which continues the tradition of the Nihon ryōiki, looks forward to the many
setsuwa collections of the medieval period and reveals the widening social and
religious interests of the aristocracy and priesthood. In contrast to the Nihon

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 Introduction: court culture, women, and the rise of vernacular literature

ryōiki, which was written in Literary Sinitic, Tales of Times Now Past was
written in a mixed style that merged kana with the kanbun kundoku (a
Japanese style of reading Chinese prose) style. This new wakan (Japanese–
Chinese) mixed style eventually produced gunki-mono (military narratives) like
The Tales of the Heike, which became a hallmark of early medieval literature.
The late Heian period was also when the Ryōjin hishō, a collection of kayō (folk
songs), was compiled. This work might be considered the song equivalent of
Tales of Times Now Past in reflecting Pure Land Buddhism and commoner life.
Court literature based on waka and the monogatari continued to flourish
among the aristocracy and royalty in the late Heian period. Six chokusenshū,
or imperial waka collections, authorized by the emperor, were compiled
between the Kokinshū, in the early tenth century, and the Shinkokinshū, the
poetry of which was often marked by allusive variation on earlier waka (such
as those found in the Kokinshū). One of the most important of the late Heian
imperial waka anthologies was the Senzaishū, compiled in 1188 by Fujiwara
no Shunzei, a prominent judge at uta-awase, which became a dominant
genre. Shunzei and his son Fujiwara no Teika, perhaps the most important
poet in the medieval period, also contributed to a growing body of karon, or
poetic treatises, which first emerged in the mid-Heian period and flourished
in the late Heian and early medieval period.
The monogatari, or vernacular prose fiction depicting aristocratic life,
continued to be written in significant numbers. The most famous are the
Sagoromo monogatari (The Tale of Sagoromo) and the Tsutsumi chūnagon
monogatari (The Stories of the Riverside Middle Counselor), both of which
were heavily influenced by The Tale of Genji. Some of these later monogatari
can in fact be seen as allusive variations on The Tale of Genji, in much the same
way that many poems in the Shinkokinshū were often allusive variations on
the earlier poetry of the Kokinshū.
Historically, The Tale of Genji takes on particular importance because
it became canonical by the time of the Shinkokinshu, by the early thirteenth
century, as a result of the influence of waka poets such as Shunzei and Teika,
who saw it as central to the diction of waka; and in subsequent centuries the
Heian kana writings (rather than the writing of the ancient or medieval
period) would continue to be the model for writing in the high vernacular
(wabun). The ancient period would not emerge as the other “classical period”
until the eighteenth century, with the full development of Kokugaku (nativist
studies), which canonized the major texts of the Nara period: the Man’yōshū,
Nihon shoki, and Kojiki.

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 8
Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus
and statesman
robert borgen

Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) ranks among the best-known poets of the

Heian period, although he must also be among the least often read. He is a
familiar figure because he was posthumously deified and shrines dedicated to
him remain popular today. He has come to be regarded as a sort of patron
saint of examinees and so students flock to his shrines to pray for his help in
gaining admission to the schools of their choice. Although they probably
know he was a famous poet, they are not likely to have read much of his
poetry since his most important works were written in difficult classical
Chinese.
Even in his own day, Michizane’s preference for composition in Chinese
already was slightly anachronistic. Familiar clichés characterize the previous
Nara period as the age of great enthusiasm for Chinese culture, in contrast to
the later centuries of the Heian, when Japan looked inward and assimilated
elements previously borrowed from China to develop its native, indigenous
culture. Although these clichés do not hold up to close scrutiny, neither are
they totally misleading. In their Nara capital, Japanese aristocrats adminis-
tered the land through a bureaucratic government based on Tang models and
many elements of their culture, both material and literary, looked very
Chinese. In the mid ninth century, around the time of Michizane’s birth,
some aspects of the culture that had been imported in the Nara period, or
even earlier, began to be displaced by new cultural forms, colored by the
borrowings but distinctively Japanese. Michizane would witness many of
these changes and even contribute to them, but, on the whole, both his
career and his literary achievements might be seen as representing the
culmination of earlier patterns; and his eventual failure as a court official as
symbolic of their decline.
Through the Nara period, Michizane’s ancestors had served as minor
officials at court. The move of the capital to Heian marked a change in the
family’s fortunes. When a new emperor, Kanmu (737–806, r. 781–806), sought

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 Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus and statesman

to revitalize the Chinese-style system of government as a means of enhancing

imperial authority, his plan included the creation of a new capital.
Coincidentally, Michizane’s grandfather Kiyokimi (770–842) had been
admitted as a student of literature at the court university (Daigakuryō), just
five years before the Heian capital was established in 794. The university
taught Confucian classics to young men who might qualify for a civil service
examination and careers at court. Although most students were from court
families, success in the examinations allowed those from lesser families to
improve their status. Kiyokimi was one such example. He probably could
have enjoyed a modest career at court even without his Sinological skills, but
the new emperor and his immediate successors sought to promote a Chinese-
style state and so Kiyokimi, after passing the examination, was promoted to
high office, far exceeding anything previously held by members of his family.
Among his achievements was service as an officer on the penultimate
diplomatic mission to the Tang, which visited the Chinese capital of
Chang’an in 804–5. Later, between 814 and 827, Sinophile emperors spon-
sored the compilation of three anthologies of literature written in Chinese by
Japanese authors. Kiyokimi served on the editorial boards of all three. His son
Koreyoshi (812–80), Michizane’s father, continued the tradition. He too
proved to be a talented Sinologist who served as a professor of literature
and eventually rose to high office, although he was less involved in governing
than his father had been.
By the time of Michizane’s birth, the Sugawara were known as a family of
court scholars. Michizane’s achievements, both as a writer and as an official,
would far exceed those of his father and grandfather. Like them, he studied
Chinese literature at the university and entered the government after passing
the civil service examination. Eventually he followed in the footsteps of both
his grandfather and his father by being named professor of literature. In the
ancient Japanese bureaucracy, a professor was simply an official who hap-
pened to have specialized skills and, as an official, Michizane also held other
government posts. Most of them were at court, but in 886, after nine years as
professor, he was named governor of Sanuki province, the modern Kagawa
prefecture. Such provincial appointments were commonplace among court
literati, and so, reluctantly, Michizane served his four-year term in the
provinces. While he was there, a new emperor, Uda (867–931, r. 887–97),
had come to the throne. By this time, the powerful Fujiwara were beginning
to dominate high office at court.
The Fujiwara, long among the most influential aristocratic families, began
to consolidate their position in the mid ninth century. The key event

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occurred in 858, when the enthronement of a child emperor allowed Fujiwara

no Yoshifusa (804–72) to take the post of regent, the first from outside the
imperial family. Although eventually that office or its equivalent would
become all but hereditary among Yoshifusa’s descendants, when Uda became
emperor in 887 the status of the Fujiwara was not yet secure. Although Uda
was already an adult, Yoshifusa’s adopted son Mototsune (836–91) was offered
a title comparable to regent. This precipitated a seemingly esoteric quarrel
over terminology. The scholar who drafted the document naming
Mototsune to his new post borrowed an elegant title from Chinese antiquity
to describe it. A rival scholar from the Fujiwara family, however, claimed that
the alternate title was purely honorary, with no powers attached. Mototsune
was not amused. The whole court was dragged into the ensuing debate. In
the end, Uda gave in, punished the scholar who had drafted the document,
and awarded Mototsune the title he had sought.
Although Michizane was safely in the provinces during the quarrel, he felt
obliged to offer his opinion. The scholarly victim was a former student of his
father’s and moreover Michizane believed the whole affair threatened his
vocation. In Michizane’s world, scholarship meant a form of Sinology that
combined mastery of the Chinese classics with the ability to make practical
use of such knowledge by composing elegant Chinese. Compositions
included both prose and poetry, both official documents and personal expres-
sions. All such writings might be regarded as literature if they were written in
elevated, allusive language that often followed metric rules similar to those
that in English would be found only in poetry. Thus the distinction between
literary and non-literary writing was not what modern readers might expect
and even government documents, such as one appointing a high official,
might be both scholarly and literary, as demonstrated by the appearance of
such documents in literary anthologies. As a man whose family had risen in
the world because of its “literary” skills, Michizane wrote a long and strongly
worded letter to Mototsune defending both his colleague and the practice of
literary composition, which required use of elegant synonyms.
Michizane’s letter had no effect on the debate at court, but it did demon-
strate his willingness to challenge those in power and his letter – or at least
the attitude expressed in it – caught the emperor’s attention. Uda sought to
rule on his own, and so, following Mototsune’s death in 891, he began
appointing to high office men with few ties to the Fujiwara regents,
Michizane being the most prominent among them. At the time, Michizane
was forty-seven years old; Mototsune’s heir Tokihira (871–909) was an
inexperienced young man of twenty-one. Despite his youth, at first

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Tokihira held considerably higher office, but that did not last. In 897, they
were given roughly equivalent offices and a month later Uda abdicated in
favor of his son, who then became Emperor Daigo (885–930, r. 897–930). Uda
left his son a testament that, along with other advice, encouraged him to rely
on two ministers, Tokihira and Michizane. As Daigo had already celebrated
his coming of age, they were not named regents, but Uda appears to have
hoped they would serve in something approximating that capacity. Although
he named both, his testament strongly suggests that he had greater con-
fidence in Michizane. In 899, they were given the two highest regular offices
at court: Tokihira, minister of the left, and Michizane, minister of the right.
Protocol gave the minister of the left priority, but the posts had identical
responsibilities. Tokihira’s title may have been slightly superior, but surviv-
ing records suggest Michizane was more active in administrative affairs.
During his years in high office, Michizane made one proposal that would
have a lasting influence on Japan’s relations with China. Although the Heian
period is apt to be seen as an age when Japan turned its back to continental
Asia, in fact Japan was in regular, if not frequent, contact with neighboring
lands, and Michizane had long been involved in diplomatic activities.
Whereas his grandfather – and later an uncle too – had served as envoys to
the Tang, Michizane remained at home, but he did help receive missions from
the kingdom of Parhae (J. Bokkai, Ch. Bohai) three times, starting in 872.
Although today largely forgotten, Parhae flourished in what is now northeast
China and served as a valuable conduit that helped bring elements of Chinese
culture to Japan. In 894, just after the arrival of the third mission from Parhae
that Michizane would receive, he was named Ambassador to the Tang. Less
than a month later, however, he responded with a petition that the mission to
China be abandoned because of reports that China was suffering from persis-
tent civil disorder. His proposal was soon accepted. The reports were in fact
accurate and the Tang dynasty would fall thirteen years later. More than five
centuries would pass before Japan resumed diplomatic ties with China. With
the collapse of Parhae in 926, Japan all but abandoned diplomatic activity for
the remainder of the Heian period. According to one interpretation,
Michizane’s proposal demonstrated that Japan had lost interest in the cultures
of continental Asia, and the government indeed may have turned its back on
diplomacy, but Japanese courtiers continued to crave the exotic luxury goods
that Chinese merchants brought to Japan and composition in Chinese
remained a component of court literary activity.
Michizane’s career seemed to flourish under the new Emperor Daigo.
Annually, on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, when the court

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celebrated its chrysanthemum festival, the emperor would summon literati

to compose poems in Chinese on a topic he proposed. In 900, before the
break of dawn the day after the festival, Michizane wrote:
Your minister, through the years, has had his cheerful thoughts,
but this night, everything arouses only sadness:
the voice of the cold cricket in the blowing wind,
leaves falling from the paulownia tree, beaten by the rain.
You, my lord, are at your peak, while gradually I grow old.
Your generosity has been boundless, my repayment always slow.
Not knowing how to assuage this feeling,
I drink wine, listen to the koto, and recite poems. (Kanke kōshū 473)
Daigo, then only sixteen, was so touched he presented the fifty-six-year-old
Michizane a robe. Three months later, the new year began on an auspicious
note as both Michizane and Tokihira were promoted to the junior second
rank, the highest of anyone then at court. But, only eighteen days later,
Michizane was accused of plotting to manipulate the imperial succession and
banished to Dazaifu, the government headquarters in Kyushu. He was given
a nominal government post there, but in fact he was kept under house arrest.
Ironically, his downfall inspired his two best-known poems. Before leaving
his mansion in the capital, he addressed a poem in Japanese, a waka, to his
favorite plum tree:
kochi fukaba When the east wind blows,
nioi okoseyo send me your fragrance,
ume no hana plum blossoms:
aruji nashi tote although your master is gone,
haru o wasuruna do not forget the spring. (Shūishū 1006)
According to legend, the tree was so touched that it flew to Kyushu to join
him in exile. There, when the ninth month came, Michizane took out the
robe presented him by the emperor just a year before and wrote (with his
own interlinear notes):
Last year on this night, attending at Seiryō
(The name of the imperial residence)
My poem, “Autumn Thoughts,” expressed my lonely grief.
(By imperial command, we composed poems on “Autumn
Thoughts.” Mine expressed much frustration.)

Generously bestowed, that imperial robe is now beside me here.

I lift it every day to revere its lingering scent.

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 Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus and statesman

(I write this because, after the banquet had ended that night, the
emperor gave me a robe that I keep with me in a box).
(Kanke kōshū 482)

This poem, Michizane’s most familiar one in Chinese, appeals in particular to

Japanese nationalists who are impressed by Michizane’s expression of loyalty
to an emperor who had exiled him. Just over two years later, Michizane died
and was buried in the outskirts of Dazaifu.
The years that followed were marked by untimely deaths among
Michizane’s former rivals, most conspicuously in 930, when lightning struck
the palace and killed four. Michizane was posthumously pardoned, pro-
moted, and deified as Tenjin, the Heavenly Deity. Shrines were established
to worship him, the oldest at the site of his grave in Kyushu, and another at
Kitano, just north of the capital, founded in 947. Although people originally
had feared the wrath of Tenjin, already in 986 court literati were presenting
poems to Kitano Shrine and describing him as “the progenitor of literature,
the lord of poetry.” Reverence for Tenjin spread until, today, shrines dedi-
cated to the deity are among the most numerous in Japan. Through most of
their history, these shrines were apt to be centers of literary activity.
Michizane took care to preserve his writings in Chinese. Shortly before he
was exiled, he compiled what he had written up till then into a collection that
he presented to the emperor. It began with six chapters of poetry, followed by
another six of prose. In Kyushu, as his health declined, he gathered thirty-
eight poems he had written and sent them to a friend in the capital. These
two collections are extant, apparently as he compiled them, along with a few
other of his compositions in Chinese. Michizane also wrote waka and
associated with some of the major waka poets of his day. A few of his waka
are still admired, although the most familiar example, the one quoted above,
is probably remembered more for the legend that goes with it than for its
literary qualities. Michizane himself seems not to have valued his waka as
highly as he did his works in Chinese, for he did not bother to assemble them
into a collection.
Most of Michizane’s prose consists of official documents and religious
writings, often drafted for others less skilled at composition in Chinese. In
general, his most interesting work is found among his poems in Chinese.
They may be roughly divided into two categories. Some appear to be
literary exercises intended to show off Sinological knowledge. To cite one
particularly pedantic example, the poem “Rejoicing over the Rain” man-
ages to include the name of a good minister from the Han dynasty in each

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of its sixteen lines. Since the characters for the names are used in their basic
meanings, not as proper nouns, only knowledgeable readers would recog-
nize the allusions. Modern readers are apt to prefer Michizane’s less
“learned” poems. Such poems are less allusive, and hence easier to read
without the aid of footnotes. Moreover, they treat topics that would have
been difficult to address in Japanese poetry because, by Michizane’s day,
poets writing in Japanese had come to restrict themselves largely to the
thirty-one-syllable waka and a limited number of topics (such as love, the
four seasons, and parting).
A linguistically able poet such as Michizane could do things in Chinese that
were avoided in Japanese. Chinese poetry too had its rules and conventions,
but poems were longer and the range of acceptable topics greater. For
example, whereas romantic love was a standard theme in Japanese-language
literature, it was avoided in Chinese. On the other hand, in Japanese, one
rarely wrote of love for one’s children. In Chinese, Michizane wrote very
affecting poems on that subject. Official duties, another topic absent from
waka, come up in Michizane’s poetry in Chinese:
Professorial Difficulties
My family is not one of generals.
As Confucian scholars we earn our keep.
My revered grandfather attained the third rank.
My kind father’s office was High Court Noble.
Well they knew the power of learning
And wished to bequeath it for their descendants’ glory.
The day I was promoted to graduate student,1
I resolved to master the craft of my forefathers.
The year I became a professor,
Happily, the lecture hall was rebuilt.
When everyone rushed to congratulate me,
My father alone expressed concern.
Why did he express concern?
“Alas that you are an only child,” he said;
“The office of professor is not mean,
The salary of a professor is not small.
Once I too held this post
And learned to fear people’s feelings.”
Having heard this kind admonition,

1
Shūsai or tokugōshō, sometimes translated as “advanced students of literature,” were
specially selected students who prepared for the civil service examination. Michizane
was given this title at the unusually young age of twenty-three.

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 Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus and statesman

I proceeded with care as if walking on ice.

In the fourth year,2 the Council met
And ordered me to lecture the students.
But after teaching only three days,
My ears heard slanderous voices.
This year evaluating students for advancement,
The decisions were absolutely clear.
But the first student dropped for lack of talent
Denounced me and begged unearned promotion.
In my teaching, I did not make mistakes.
My selections for advancement were fair.
How true was my father’s advice
When he warned me before all this occurred. (Kanke bunsō 87)

And finally, his Confucian training led him to write on social problems. When
he was provincial governor, he wrote:
Early Cold
Who feels the cold air first?
First cold is the man who fled but was sent back.
I search the registers but nowhere is a new returnee.
Asking his name, I determine his former status.
The land in his native village is barren,
His fate always to be poor.
If men are not treated compassionately,
Surely many will continue to flee. (Kanke bunsō 200)

The government registered peasants to assign them land to be cultivated –

and taxed. In the ninth century, the system was collapsing. One reason was
that peasants would flee to avoid taxes, but flight did not always solve their
problem, as Michizane notes. This was the first in a series of ten poems, each
describing the suffering of local people, an elderly widower, an orphan, and
so forth. If poems such as these had not been written in classical Chinese, they
might find a wider audience in modern Japan, allowing Michizane to become
as widely read as his spirit is worshiped. But they are in Chinese and so
Michizane is more admired than read.

2
The fourth year of the Gangyō era, i.e. 880, three years after Michizane had been named
professor of literature.

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 9
Kokinshū and Heian court poetry
gustav heldt

Kokin wakashū (Anthology of Old and New Waka, c. 905–14) – customarily

shortened to Kokinshū – represents the next major phase in the evolution of
Japanese poetry after the late eighth-century Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad
Leaves), one whose articulation of self and world would influence Japanese
culture for a millennium. Broadly speaking, the vernacular poetry of the
ninth and tenth centuries shifted interest away from epithet-laden numinous
landscapes, focusing instead on the more generic scenes presented by gardens
and paintings in aristocratic mansions. A greater proportion of individual
poems and a more diverse vocabulary were devoted to describing human
emotions, sensations, reasoning, and actions through verbs and adjectives
whose inflections further indicated degrees of certitude. This overall turn
toward the human subject in Heian poetry also fostered new interest in
contextualizing poetry through prose.
Indicative of this shift in the balance between scene and subject was a
change in the verbs used to describe how the subject apprehended the scene.
Whereas Man’yōshū poetry favored the intransitive miyu (to appear), which
marked landscapes as active embodiments of spiritual power manifesting
themselves to mortals, this word is entirely replaced in the Kokinshū by the
transitive miru (to perceive), which often entailed an imaginative reconstruc-
tion of the scene by its viewer. Such re-visions frequently involved discover-
ing resemblances between one object and another separated from it in time
or space. Known as mitate, this trope informed many other characteristics of
the period’s poetic culture, which was fascinated by written poetry’s capacity
to create similitudes. One example was a marked increase in the use of kake-
kotoba (pivot-words) in which the same syllables or letters held two separate
meanings. When written in the ashi-de (“reed hand”) style of calligraphy,
words could also illustrate a natural scene.
The authority of the Kokinshū and its poetics was already unquestioned in
the two imperial anthologies that followed it. The first of these, Gosen

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wakashū (Anthology of Later Selections of Waka, 951) – customarily shor-

tened to Gosenshū – was chiefly concerned with memorializing the poems of
the first anthology’s editor, Ki no Tsurayuki (d. c. 945), and his peers. The
third anthology, Shūi wakashū (Anthology of Gleanings of Waka, c. 1005–7) –
customarily shortened to Shūishū – also drew extensively on uta poems from
the same period. Together with the Kokinshū, they became known as the
sandaishū (“anthologies of three reigns”) in the twilight of the Heian period at
the end of the twelfth century, referring to their compilation under Daigo
(884–930, r. 897–930), Murakami (926–67, r. 946–67), and Kazan (967–1008,
r. 984–6) respectively. The roughly two-thousand-word vocabulary they
encompassed would subsequently define orthodox poetic diction for
centuries.

Early Heian poetry

While the period between the Man’yōshū and the Kokinshū has often been
described as a dark age for native verse due to the paucity of surviving
materials, this more likely reflects the vagaries of the historical record than
the reality of the times. Official court histories show poems were still being
composed on formal occasions after Kanmu (737–806, r. 781–806) moved the
capital from Nara to Heian-kyō in 794. Over the course of the ninth century
such occasions included banquets for hunting expeditions, imperial proces-
sions, and lectures on the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720). In many of
these settings the word waka refers to uta composed in response to one by the
sovereign. This dialogic dimension was as integral to the later history of waka
as its vernacular character, and was enhanced in the Heian period by a new
appreciation of the ways in which written poems could interact with paint-
ings, prose, or other poems in sequences. Both meanings of waka – as a poem
responding to imperial command and as a harmonious arrangement with
other poems – help explain its appearance in the title of all twenty-one
imperial anthologies of uta.
Interest in preserving earlier forms of verse at this time also provided
continuity with the preceding tradition. Called furugoto (ancient words),
these included ritual songs such as kagura uta (shrine songs), azuma uta
(eastland songs), and fuzoku uta (regional songs). The Kinkafu, a collec-
tion of twenty-two songs from the early Heian period accompanied by
musical scores set to zither music, replicates many verses from the Kojiki
and Nihon shoki. A more extensive indication of early song’s continuing
importance is provided by the late tenth-century Kokin waka rokujō (Old

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and New Waka in Six Quires), a topically organized anthology of verse

which includes over a thousand poems resembling ones in the
Man’yōshū. Man’yōshū poetry was also being reproduced or reinterpreted
in numerous anthologies that variously defined the corpus of Hitomaro
at the time. Banquet songs known as saibara were yet another genre
with ties to tradition. Versions appear in the Kokinshū as anonymous
verse, and they are also alluded to in such vernacular Heian prose works
as the Genji monogatari and Yamato monogatari.
Drawing on the Kokinshū prefaces, modern literary histories often posit a
tripartite scheme for poetry of the period in which a middle era from roughly
850 to 880, known as the rokkasen jidai (Age of Six Poetic Immortals), stands
between the anonymous songs of antiquity and the age of the anthology’s
editors. In the historical chronicles, these three decades coincide with the
establishment of the first Fujiwara regency under Yoshifusa (804–72), who
was frequently involved in the ritual presentation of uta at court. Famous
examples include the recitation of a chōka by Buddhist priests from his clan
temple on the fortieth birthday of emperor Ninmyō (808–50, r. 833–50) in 849,
and waka composed along with kanshi at a memorial service for the same
emperor in 851. In his capacity as regent, Yoshifusa also oversaw cherry-
blossom banquets where poems were presented at his Somedono mansion in
864 and 866 while his grandson Emperor Seiwa (850–80, r. 858–76) was still in
his infancy. Blossom banquets were governed by seasonal time and took
place in aristocratic mansions, creating a parallel ritual cycle in which the
composition of waka served the same role as that of kanshi in ensuring
cosmological and social harmony. One result was that the cherry tree first
gained poetic prominence as a symbol of the Fujiwara regency before
becoming the paradigmatic flower of Japanese culture.

Poetry matches and screen poems

Much of the unprecedented nature of Heian waka – in particular its heigh-
tened interest in the visual and material properties of written poetry – can be
traced back to Uda (867–931, r. 887–97), whose entourage first developed uta-
awase (poetry matches) and byōbu uta (screen poems), both staples of later
court poetry. A sovereign without relatives in Yoshifusa’s line, Uda drew on
native tradition to create new rituals for himself, and showed a heightened
awareness of the importance of language in establishing his authority. As part
of this overall strategy, he co-opted Yoshifusa’s practice of composing waka
on seasonal topics in his personal mansion, and adapted it to buttress his own

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standing, both within the palace while he reigned, and at his consorts’ villas
after his abdication.
By fostering the composition of uta that harmonized with topics (dai)
provided at royal command – a practice that had previously been associated
with kanshi – Uda helped make waka a courtly form of poetry whose
communal compositions echoed the sovereign’s words in an affirmation
and enactment of his place at the center of society and the cosmos. The
development of poetic topics coincided with an overall interest in classifying
words in Uda’s reign, during which the earliest extant Heian dictionary
Shinsen jikyō (Newly Selected Mirror of Characters, 893) was produced, and
is also evident in two hybrid anthologies from the period: Kudai waka (Lines
of Shi as Topics for Waka, c. 894) and Shinsen man’yōshū (New Selections of
Myriad Leaves, c. 893–913). Whereas the former places the kanshi before the
waka, the opposite occurs in the latter anthology, which adapts vernacular
verses from a poetry match into heptasyllabic quatrains.
Kana records of such poetry matches emphasize the pageantry surround-
ing the presentation of the poems rather than the sort of critical judgments
that would dominate in later centuries. Like the roots or shells matched in
precursor events, poetry matches highlighted the materiality of the objects
being compared. Poems were inscribed on slips of paper by lower-ranking
courtiers for the team members in advance and, after being presented to Uda,
were attached to landscape dioramas known as suhama. Uda was thus staged
as the pivot between heaven and the human realm, the latter consisting of
teams whose members came from competing sub-lineages within the imper-
ial family. In acknowledgment of the pivotal role court women played in
determining the succession, several matches prominently featured the topic
of the “maiden-flower” (ominaeshi). Overall, Uda’s matches favored summer
and autumn, thereby associating the retired sovereign with the full-fledged
fruition of royal authority.
Screen poetry was another innovation of the period that first appears among
Uda’s consorts and courtiers. While poems describing paintings date back to the
Nara period, it was not until the end of the ninth century that unambiguous
examples of uta being inscribed on folding screens first appear. The earliest
instances involve the salon of Uda’s Fujiwara consort Atsuko (872–907), where
they made up fictional narratives in which the poem voiced the words or
thoughts of figures depicted on the screens. In addition to these pleasurable
pursuits, screen poems also came to serve ritual purposes over the course of the
tenth century. Chief among these were their presentation as part of decennial
celebrations, coming-of-age ceremonies, enthronement rites, and appointments

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to official posts. Like poetry matches, screen poems may also have contributed
to the structure of the Kokinshū, which frequently arranges poems in narrative
sequences organized around seasonal or spatial associations. In fact, screen
poem sequences grew markedly more lengthy after the anthology’s appear-
ance, as did the number of panels making up the folding screens, which
expanded from four to as many as six, eight, or even twelve at this time.
Often, the content of the painting was relatively generic until the affixed
poem assigned the scene to a particular place or occasion. Screen poems also
often deployed mitate, pivot words, and reflective surfaces to supplement the
painted scene with additional layers of imagery or meaning, blurring distinc-
tions between real and imaginary spaces in the process, as well as locating the
viewpoint expressed in the poem both outside and within the painted scene.
Like much of the period’s poetry, screen poems often favored complex
expressions of qualification and negation to modulate their assertions of
similitude. This preference for nuanced language that was indirect, witty,
or oblique in orientation was eminently suited to a poet with multiple
potential audiences that included not only the patron but that person’s
peers as well. Ambiguity was also encouraged by the economy of thirty-
one syllables, which favored the omission of the honorifics used in speech and
prose, thereby making uta a uniquely flexible form of communication within
an otherwise intensely hierarchical society.

The Kokinshū prefaces

Much of what we know about the historical circumstances surrounding the
compilation of the Kokinshū is taken from its prefaces, according to which it
originated in a command by Uda’s successor Daigo. After the editors had
selected and compiled material taken from older songs not in the Man’yōshū
and the household collections of their peers, completion of the anthology was
marked by a banquet and its official presentation for royal perusal in 905.
Internal evidence, however, indicates that the anthology’s content evolved
over nearly a decade past that point. Other materials suggest it originated as
an attempt to revive Yoshifusa’s springtime poetic regime under his adoptive
grandson Tokihira (871–909), who effectively ruled as regent in the first
decade of the tenth century. Having already celebrated his sister’s entry to
the palace with waka on the topic of wisteria at a banquet in 902, this
seasoned politician quite probably inspired the young emperor’s command
to compile the Kokinshū.

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 Kokinshū and Heian court poetry

Of the anthology’s two prefaces, the more commented-on is the Kana

Preface, named after the syllabic kana script used to write it, and composed
by the anthology’s chief editor Ki no Tsurayuki (d. c. 945). On the other
hand, the Mana Preface, which is named after the literary Chinese it was
written in by Tsurayuki’s scholarly clan-mate Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919),
was intended for the sovereign. Together, the prefaces not only define the
uta, but also describe its history, purpose, and stylistic features, making
them as ambitious in scope as the hallowed Great Preface to the Shijing
(Classic of Poetry).
Both Kokinshū prefaces borrow the Great Preface’s literary historical model
of decline and revival, claiming the current sovereign is renewing poetry’s
former glory as public performance after it had retreated to private residences
in the recent past. Both also list the same six exemplary poets from this time,
among whom Ono no Komachi and Ariwara no Narihira (825–80) are
particularly well represented in the anthology, ensuring their canonical
standing in the later literary tradition as paragons of the amorous poet. At
the same time, however, the Mana Preface attributes a wide array of metrical
structures to waka, whereas the Kana Preface focuses exclusively on the
thirty-one-syllable form it calls yamato uta (“Yamato verse”).
The Kana Preface would become a touchstone for later accounts of court
poetry, particularly its opening description of the act of composition:
“Yamato verse has people’s hearts for its seed, manifesting in a myriad leaves
of words. Since people in this world grow thick with events and deeds, they
attach things seen and heard in the world to what they feel in their heart,
putting this into words.” The primacy of people’s hearts is often taken to
mean that the preface views poetry as the lyrical expression of universal
human emotions. In keeping with this interest in kokoro (heart), the Kana
Preface presents the world as something perceived by the mind through
“things seen and heard” (miru mono kiku mono) by it. This division between
human and natural elements also informs Tsurayuki’s ensuing account of six
poetic “styles” (sama), which is perhaps the Kana Preface’s most innovative
contribution to Japanese poetics. Whereas the Mana Preface gives a perfunc-
tory list of the Shijing’s six principles, the Kana Preface’s six styles give
examples. Each such poem provides a different configuration of human and
natural elements, ranging from archaic forms of juxtaposition and repetition
to more streamlined versions enabled by pivot words and acrostics. The
latter two are often dependant on orthographic manipulation, recalling the
emphasis placed on written “leaves of words” (koto no ha) in the preface’s
opening passage.

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The structure of the Kokinshū

The categories of poetry in the Kokinshū and the arrangement of poems
within them are the anthology’s most distinctive contribution to the later
poetic tradition. Scholars from medieval to modern times have read indivi-
dual poems through a fine-grained taxonomy of poetic topics and sequencing
techniques that include shared vocabulary, temporal or spatial progressions,
and shared occasions. The Kokinshū also drew on the structural principle of
complementary pairs that underlay conceptions of society and the cosmos
throughout traditional East Asia. At the macro-level, for example, the anthol-
ogy’s final scroll of ritual verse from the Bureau of Grand Songs (Ō-uta-
dokoro) forms a complement with all of the preceding nineteen scrolls,
reflecting the state bureaucracy’s division into religious and secular branches.
Within the first nineteen scrolls, a further pairing of heavenly and human
spheres is made by the two largest multiscroll categories, Four Seasons (shiki)
and Love (koi), which together formed the backbone of later waka antholo-
gies. While the former described the subject’s relationship to heaven’s cycles,
the relationship with others in the latter are linear, moving inexorably from
impatient anticipation for a lover’s show of interest to disappointment at its
loss. This twofold temporality followed that of earlier poem matches, in
which a formal contest involving seasonal topics was concluded with an
informal banquet at which amorous saibara songs were recited and com-
posed. Many such songs populate Love in the Kokinshū, whose opening verse
is an anonymous poem set in the sultry summertime.
The first Seasons scroll opens with a spring scene whose snowy imagery
also invokes the sequence of rites observed over the first days of the court’s
calendar year. The plum now becomes chiefly recognized for its scent, as
visual interest shifts (in the course of the two Spring scrolls) to the cherry tree
which, like the wisteria that end Spring, marked Fujiwara glory. Summer is
devoted to lush growth and bush warblers (hototogisu) bearing tidings from
the deceased. Like the Man’yōshū, autumn is the best-represented season in
the Kokinshū, where its visual splendor is heightened by replacing the for-
mer’s yellow foliage with the brilliant scarlet of maple leaves. Winter was
devoted to poems on the felicitous topic of snow.
Blessings (ga) and Laments (aishō) provide another complementary
temporal pairing as poems demarcating the individual human lifespan,
between prayers for long life in the former and dirges for the deceased in
the latter. Blessings follows the seasons, and condenses its cyclical time
into a historical genealogy tracing the descent of Daigo’s heir from both

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men and women in the imperial and Fujiwara clans. Laments, which
follows Love and thus comments on the ultimate end to all desire,
progresses from poems mourning the departed to ones by an individual
on the verge of death. Both it and Blessings thus have an implicitly
cyclical structure in which the births and deaths at their ends inaugurate
a future round of birthdays and funerals.
Another pair is formed between Partings (ribetsu) and Travel (kiryo),
both of which map out the rites and routes associated with imperial
outings and official postings. Travel was an entirely new category, and
the most tightly symmetrical section of the entire anthology. By contrast
with these scrolls, the two making up Miscellaneous Verse (zō no uta)
focus on life in the capital and its environs. Like Love, the relationships
of the courtier in this section are doomed to decline as the banquet
poems of the first scroll that celebrate social harmony are replaced in the
second scroll by ones that describe religious retreat, retirement from
government, and pleas for promotion.
The remaining categories of Names of Things (mono no na) and
Miscellaneous Forms (zattei) share a heightened awareness of language.
The first consists of poems whose letters hide the name of a natural object
or place. These are organized along the lines of the topical encyclopedias
used by the otherwise unknown scholars who wrote them. Miscellaneous
Forms transgress the metrical and pragmatic norms of poetic language
either by exceeding the thirty-one syllables mandated for court waka, or
by conveying humor in haikai (irregular) verse that drew on an earlier
tradition of cursing. The placement of haikai poems just before the final
scroll of ritual songs in the Kokinshū reflects their incantatory potential to
disrupt social harmony, something that could be marginalized but not
dispensed with entirely.
Though they followed the Kokinshū’s twenty-scroll structure, the two
subsequent imperial waka anthologies omitted some categories and re-
arranged or redefined others. Both replaced the celebratory hymns that end
their predecessor with the dirges of Laments, thus substituting the linear time
of human life for the cyclical time of communal ritual. Gosenshū dispensed
with the officialdom represented in Travel and Names of Things entirely,
while expanding Love and Miscellaneous Verse. Its ending condensed the
chronologies represented by other pairs of Kokinshū categories by combining
Partings with Travel and Blessings with Laments. Shūishū introduced a new
category in the form of kagura uta, while dividing its Miscellaneous section
into the subcategories of Spring, Autumn, Blessings, and Love.

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Gosenshū and narrative uta

After languishing under Daigo’s successor Suzaku (922–52, r. 930–46), poetic
culture revived with the accession of Murakami to the throne. Various
accounts describe his interest in such communal activities as kanshi matches
and musical concerts, making his reign a high point of tenth-century court
culture comparable to those of Uda and Daigo. The elaborate pageantry of
poetry matches reached new heights at this time with the famous Tentoku
dairi uta-awase (Palace Poetry Match of the Tentoku Era, 960) that helped to
inspire the famous depiction of a picture contest in The Tale of Genji.
According to his diary, Murakami was responding to a request from his
women attendants, who had wanted to match a kanshi contest held by
their male colleagues at the palace in the previous autumn.
During this period, uta increasingly informed the everyday discourse of
aristocrats, who are frequently seen dropping poetic allusions into their written
and spoken exchanges with one another. This trend is epitomized by the second
waka anthology Gosenshū, which was completed a few years after Tsurayuki’s
death. Unlike Kokinshū, the Gosenshū lacks a preface, possesses redundant
poems, and omits any mention of its editors. Although these features have
led some scholars to wonder if the surviving version is a draft, the project did
begin with a royal decree by Murakami in 951 establishing a bureau for editing
waka in the quarters of his consort Anshi (927–64). Staffed by five officials
known to posterity as “The Pear Court Five” (Nashitsubo no Gonin) after the
courtyard by Anshi’s rooms, these men embarked on the twofold task of
compiling a new imperial anthology and providing glosses for the Man’yōshū.
In keeping with the place where it was compiled, the Gosenshū has a more
pronounced female presence than any other imperial waka anthology. The
majority of these women are court officials, lady attendants, and young girls,
with princesses and empresses from Suzaku’s court being particularly well
represented. Many appear in the Love section exchanging poems with noble-
men. Exchanges characterize the anthology overall, as exemplified by its best-
represented poet, Tsurayuki, who is now seen corresponding in verse with
his patrons. These exchanges are further fleshed out by the detail and length
of the prose that frames their poems, making the Gosenshū similar to the
poem-tales of its time.
A plethora of anthologies from this period share the Gosenshū’s interest in
creating tales from poem sequences. One of the earliest examples, the
Tsurayuki-shū (Tsurayuki Collection), ends in a third-person account of its
eponymous protagonist’s death, thereby illustrating how household

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anthologies could develop from a poet’s personal collection into a biographi-

cal tale through the accretion of later readers’ contributions. The most
famous example of a biographical poetry anthology is the Ise-shū (Lady Ise
Collection), which portrays the best-represented female poet of the tenth
century. Other collections were flagrantly fictional, such as the Ichijō sesshō
gyōshū (His Highness the First Avenue Regent’s Collection), whose high-
ranking protagonist Fujiwara no Koretada (924–72) assumes the guise of a
lowly official. Still others developed entirely new organizational schemes,
such as the Maigetsushū (Monthly Collection, c. 960) by the famously icono-
clastic Sone no Yoshitada, which groups poems into sequences of one
hundred verses (hyakushu), a form of mini-anthology integral to later waka
textual culture.

Shūishū and Fujiwara no Kintō

The third imperial waka anthology was compiled under Kazan, who was an
avid sponsor of poetry matches and other poetic gatherings throughout his
life. As with Uda, the purpose behind these events was often to negotiate
familial relations. Because Kazan had already abdicated when Shūishū was
compiled, however, its imperial status is ambiguous. In fact, a collection of
571 poems shared with Kazan’s anthology – known as Shūishō (Notes on
Gleanings, c. 997) – was traditionally more revered on account of being
authored by the foremost poet of the time, Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041).
While scholars up through the Edo period assumed Kintō’s collection was the
seed for the imperial anthology, however, it is just as plausible that its
contents were selected from the Shūishū.
In place of exchanges, the Shūishū relies on poetry matches and screen poems
for its selections, with the latter being particularly prevalent in the anthology’s
seasonal section. It is also the first imperial waka anthology to include examples
of renga (linked verse), which appear in its Miscellaneous Blessings section, as
well as the entirely new subcategory of Buddhist Verse (shakkyō-ka) in Laments.
In addition to poets appearing in the previous two anthologies, it includes many
who were active from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.
In the decade after Kazan’s retirement, Kintō became the premier arbiter
of poetic taste under the patronage of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), who
encouraged the composition of waka as part of banquets, birthday celebra-
tions, and official appointments. The most commented-on and controversial
instance was a command issued by Michinaga in 999 to the uppermost
nobility, including Kazan, ordering them to submit poems for screens he

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had commissioned to mark his daughter’s entry into the palace as a consort.
By having high-ranking aristocrats play a role usually reserved for lower-
ranking courtiers, the event also marked the extent to which poetic composi-
tion had now become associated with the latter group.
As heir to the learned but politically waning Ononomiya branch of the
Fujiwara clan, Kintō exemplifies the ascendance at this time of the aristocratic
scholar-poet who would define court poetic culture in medieval times. He
was particularly broad in his learning, having mastered the study of music,
kanshi, and court ritual. Kintō was also a prolific writer who not only
compiled three personal anthologies, but also the first collection organized
around a canon of sanjūrokkasen (thirty-six poet-sages), a popular genre in
later centuries. Another influential anthology of his was the Wakan rōeishū
(Collection of Japanese and Chinese Lines for Chanting), which became a
veritable encyclopedia of quotations for medieval writers.
Kintō also wrote two poetics treatises: the Waka kuhon (Nine Grades of
Waka) and Shinsen zuinō (Newly Selected Essentials). The former ranks pairs of
poems according to the Tendai sect’s nine grades of eligibility for rebirth in the
Pure Land, with superior ones relying on “implied meaning” (amari no kokoro).
Shinsen zuinō, on the other hand, includes more extensive criticism. It opens by
declaring that poetry overall should exhibit deep feelings and charming points
with a clean form. The treatise also argued that repetitions of sound and sense
should be avoided (a view unchallenged for centuries afterwards). Using the
language of Buddhist meditation, Kintō advocates a focused vision in lieu of a
random string of images, before concluding by urging would-be poets to study
the corpus of Tsurayuki, early songs, and utamakura consisting of the place
names and epithets that lay at the heart of old songs.
The importance Kintō placed on Kokinshū-period poetry would inform
court uta in the eleventh century and beyond. In one famous anecdote from
the contemporaneous Pillow Book, for example, Murakami is depicted testing
his consort’s knowledge of individual Kokinshū poems after providing her
with the poet’s name and the circumstances in which it was written. The Tale
of Genji’s author (who received the sobriquet of Murasaki from Kintō himself)
frequently alluded to Kokinshū poetry, even drawing on its categories of
Partings and Laments to help organize her “Suma” and “Maboroshi” chapters
respectively. Insofar as Murasaki Shikibu’s masterpiece would become an
embodiment of courtly culture and a template for later literature, the
ubiquity of Kokinshū poetry within it helped guarantee the anthology’s
prominence well beyond the Heian period, as well as the enduring influence
of its poetry on Japanese culture for centuries afterward.

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 10
Early Heian court tales
joshua s. mostow

In modern parlance, the term monogatari (variously translated in English as

tale, romance, novel) refers to relatively long prose narratives, chiefly con-
cerning relations between aristocratic men and women, told in the equiva-
lent of the third person, and produced among the nobility from the early
tenth century until some time in the Kamakura period (1185–1333). This
chapter traces the emergence of this genre up until the appearance of The
Tale of Genji in the early eleventh century, which marks its pinnacle.
The earliest extant monogatari is traditionally taken to be Taketori
monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, c. 909), called in Genji “the
parent of literary romances first to come out” (monogatari no ideki-hajime
no oya). Some scholars believe the present work to be a rewriting of an
earlier version; the present text is believed to have come into existence
between 810 and 910.
Elements of the Taketori resemble some of the tales or myths found in the
Nihon shoki (or Nihongi; Chronicles of Japan, 720), and the fudoki, or local
gazetteers, originally ordered from each province by Empress Genmei in 713.
Each province was to provide accounts of its topographical and other natural
features, along with legends concerning local sites of significance. Tango
fudoki includes the legend of Nagu Shrine, which is similar to the basic
Taketori story, being a version of the “swan-maiden” tale that is found
throughout East Asia, in which a heavenly maiden is robbed of her feather-
robe and married to a mortal or raised by a mortal couple.
In addition to folklore, however, Heian Japan was obviously aware of the
short fiction that circulated in Tang China. The most influential was perhaps
You xianku (J. Yūsenkutsu), or A Dalliance in the Immortals’ Den. Probably
written by Zhang Zhou (c. 657–730), it is a first-person account in which the
protagonist happens upon the dwelling of a widow and woos her with poetry
and humor, facilitated by another woman, who serves as a kind of go-
between. The piece ends with a fairly explicit description of the principals

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making love, followed by a variety of poems concerning the sadness of

parting.
Influence from the You xianku can be seen as early as the eighth-century
Man’yōshū, in such pieces as the “Excursion to Matsura River” (5: 857–63),
which was also influenced by the narrative poem Luo-shen fu (Rhyme-Prose
on the Goddess of the Lo River). Man’yōshū also includes several other
narrative tales, especially in Book Sixteen, including a version with an old
bamboo cutter and nine “heavenly maidens.” In all these stories, the basic
theme is the meeting of a man with heavenly maidens who, often by means
of some kind of magical food or drink, are capable of offering immortality.

Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo

Cutter)
Elixirs of immortality also underlie The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. An old man
discovers a radiant girl, three inches high, in the bamboo he gathers. After
taking her home to raise, the old man starts finding gold in the bamboo he
collects, and becomes rich. The girl continues to shine, and the mere sight of
her lifts the old man’s spirits.
Eventually, having grown to full size in a matter of months, the girl
becomes the object of romantic interest for five aristocratic suitors.
Scholars since the Edo period have attempted to match the names of the
five suitors with specific historical individuals, especially Prince Kuramochi
with Fujiwara no Fuhito (659–720), the second son of the founder of the
Fujiwara clan, Fujiwara (formerly Nakatomi) no Kamatari (614–69). Given
the parodic treatment of the suitors, such identifications can lead to a political
reading of the Taketori: that it is a criticism of the Fujiwara sekkan-ke, or
“Regents’ House,” and their clients, and especially their control of the
imperial family through intermarriage.
The heroine of Taketori, The Shining Princess (Kaguya-hime), sets five
individual and seemingly impossible tasks for her suitors to test their devo-
tion. Regardless of any political implications, the objects sought are all
magical: the stone begging-bowl of the Buddha, a jeweled branch from
Mount Penglai (J. Hōrai), a robe made of fire-rat skin, impervious to flames,
a jewel from the neck of a dragon, and an easy-birthing charm.
The five suitors fail, much to Kaguya-hime’s delight. With each she
exchanges poems at the moment of their defeat, and each of the suitors’
episodes ends with a facetious etymology for some expression; for example,

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Prince Kuramochi throws away the stone bowl (hachi o sutsu) after it is
discovered to be a fraud, and is said to also discard his shame (haji o sutsu).
The emperor then learns of Kaguya-hime and attempts to win her. She
refuses him as well, but does engage in a regular romantic correspondence that
is said to comfort them both (tagai ni nagusamu). Increasingly depressed,
Kaguya-hime reveals to her adopted parents that she is in fact from the
moon – as a result of committing some sin she was exiled to earth for a period
of time. But her sentence is coming to an end, and the moon-people will soon
be coming to bring her back. The old bamboo cutter alerts the emperor, who
dispatches two thousand warriors to repulse the moon-people, but when the
celestial troupe arrives the soldiers are unable to resist, the doors to the
dwelling open of their own accord, and Kaguya-hime floats into the sky to
rejoin her people. We are told that once she dons her feathered robe, she will
forget all about the earth and the people on it, once more free from any kind of
pain or suffering. But beforehand she writes letters of farewell and regret to
both her parents and the emperor, accompanied by containers of the elixir of
immortality. Both the parents and the emperor refuse the elixir, the emperor
going so far as to have it, and a final poem to her, taken to the top of the
mountain “closest to heaven” – Mount Fuji (which itself is said to mean “no
death”) – and burned, accounting for the smoke that at the time still rose from
the peak.
In the Tang dynasty, many stories and poems circulated about the meet-
ings of the emperors Mu (343–61) and Wu (236–90) with the Queen Mother of
the West (Xi Wang Mu). In these texts, the emperors approach the queen
mother to be taught the secrets of Taoist alchemy and to obtain an elixir of
immortality, though they ultimately fail or are refused. Significantly, in
Taketori, it is the emperor who refuses the elixir he is given by the female
immortal, choosing instead to live in sorrow, remembering his love. Such a
conclusion seems a powerful rejection of the Taoist search to transcend life
and mortality, and a strong affirmation of the value of human sentiment. The
tale also marks the first appearance of several durable motifs, including the
exile of a young noble (kishu ryūri), and the woman who will not marry
(reprised as Ōigimi and Ukifune in Genji).

Ise monogatari and other poem-tales

The influence of Tang literature continued in Japanese vernacular fiction and
poetry after Taketori. The Ise Stories is a collection of 125 anecdotes, centered
around exchanges of poetry, typically between a man and a woman. The

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work is attributed to Ariwara no Narihira (825–80), but was added to and

adapted by many hands, not reaching its “definitive” state until the 1234
Tenpuku-bon edited by Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). Nonetheless, at the
core of the collection lies a number of stories and poems composed by
Narihira. The most important of these is the tale that gives the collection
its name, where the unnamed protagonist visits Ise Shrine as an imperial
envoy and spends a night making love to the Ise Priestess. Elements of the
story seem to have been drawn from the Tang short vernacular tale Ying-ying
zhuan (The Story of Ying-ying). There are also several exchanges of poems
that resemble the seemingly passionate homosocial verse of poets such as Bo
Juyi. On the other hand, many of the episodes are reminiscent of similar
narrativized exchanges of poems between spouses collected in Book Sixteen
of the Man’yōshū. Finally, the anecdotes seem to be given as exemplars of
courtly behavior (miyabi), much as many of the anecdotes of the fifth-century
Shishuo xinyu (New Tales of the World, J. Sesetsu shingo) exemplify the
principle of ziran (J. shizen; “naturalness”) and its associated concept of fengliu
(J. fūryū), which was itself sometimes translated as miyabi, or “courtliness.”
Ise also picks up on the motif of exile that was present in Taketori, this time
with an undeniably political context: the protagonist has relations with a
woman promised to the crown prince. Upon discovery, he decides that a
tactical removal to the hinterlands is in order. The political interpretation can
also be taken further, seeing Narihira’s interference with Fujiwara marriage
politics as an overtly political attempt to break that clan’s monopoly on
providing consorts to the imperial house. Regardless, it is no doubt significant
that the locus of “courtliness” (miyabi) as depicted is centered not on the
Fujiwara-controlled imperial court, but among the salons of the politically
disenfranchised.
Ise has many poems, and narrative sections, in common with the first
imperially commissioned anthology of Japanese poetry, Kokin wakashū, or
Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems (c. 905–14); it is believed that both
Ise and Kokinshū derived these episodes from a common source. The narra-
tive impulse is even more pronounced in the second imperial anthology,
Gosenshū (Collection of Later Gleanings, 951) compiled by the “The Pear
Court Five” (Nashitsubo no Gonin), who included Kiyowara no Motosuke
(908–90) and Minamoto no Shitagō (911–83). Many of the headnotes to poems
in Gosenshū are relatively extended narratives, as in Ise, which also underwent
expansion at this time.
Starting with Ise and Gosenshū, the second half of the tenth century sees an
explosion in vernacular fiction. Yamato monogatari (Tales of Yamato) centers

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around the court and salon of Retired Emperor Uda (867–931, r. 887–97). Uda
attempted to escape Fujiwara control by abdicating in favor of his young son,
Daigo (885–930, r. 897–930), and balancing Fujiwara no Tokihira (871–909),
Minister of the Left, with Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) as Minister of the
Right. By 901, however, Tokihira had engineered Michizane’s banishment
and Daigo remained thoroughly under Fujiwara control. In Yamato, though,
the Fujiwara are conspicuous by their absence, and some have suggested that
it was compiled in reaction to the inclusion of so many Fujiwara in Gosenshū.
Heichū monogatari was produced some time before 965. It too can be read as
a manifestation of anti-Fujiwara discontent. The protagonist is Taira no
Sadafun (d. 923), someone known principally as a poet from the Kokinshū
period (he has nine poems included in that anthology). Heichū (a nickname
for Sadafun of partially obscure origin) is a collection of thirty-nine episodes,
focusing, much like Ise, on his pursuit of various women. Unlike Narihira,
however, Heichū is comically unsuccessful. It is this very lack of success that
can be seen as a critique of the Fujiwara-dominated court; as Susan Videen
writes: “The author of Tales of Heichū takes a man of noble birth, who has a
reputation as a sensitive poet and lover; of all men, he seems to be saying, this
one should be a success in life and love. And yet by painting Heichū as a failure,
he conveys the ironic truth that, in his day and age, talent and depth of feelings
are not what really matter” (28–9). The sekkan-ke responded to the challenge of
both Ise and Heichū, in Fujiwara no Koremasa (also read Koretada, 924–72) and
his “Tale of Toyokage” (970–71), a fictional persona who is of low rank like
Heichū and Narihira, but, unlike them, does not pursue politically inappropri-
ate women, and yet does succeed with the ladies, despite his status. Koremasa
was the steward (bettō) of the Poetry Bureau (waka-dokoro) during the compila-
tion of Gosenshū, which may account for his interest in new narrative forms.
Some of the poems and events in Toyokage appeared earlier in Gosenshū
under Koremasa’s name, and all the events are thought to be drawn from his
life. The poems are meant to be understood as being sent as, or with, letters,
so it is not surprising to see the appearance around this time of what may be
thought of as an epistolary novel, the Tōnomine Shōshō monogatari (see chapter
15 below, “Heian literary diaries”). The figure of an aristocratic male, longing
to renounce the world despite attachments to family, will recur throughout
the monogatari corpus.

Tsukuri-monogatari
As can be seen from the above, genre boundaries were very fluid in this
period, and the same work might be labeled a “tale” (monogatari) or a

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“diary/journal” (nikki), or even “poetry collection” (shū). Modern scholars

identify most of these works, from Ise monogatari to Tōnomine Shōshō
monogatari, as uta-monogatari, or “poem-tales” – essentially collections of
poems with brief, contextualizing prose. It is not until the proportion of
prose to poems becomes significantly greater that a new genre is recognized
by modern scholars, namely tsukuri-monogatari, or “made-up tales.” The
earliest extant example, after Taketori, is Utsuho monogatari, a work that
seems to combine all the elements discussed so far. The first of twenty
books is a fantastic tale, along the lines of Taketori, of one Kiyohara no
Toshikage becoming shipwrecked on his way to China and meeting various
magical beings – including the Buddha! – and finally being given thirty koto
(a kind of floor harp) and mystical instruction in their playing, before
eventually making his way back to Japan. The remaining nineteen chapters,
however, mostly eschew the supernatural and focus on the many suitors of
a young woman, Atemiya, including one of her full brothers, Nakazumi;
and then on political matters after she is given to the crown prince and bears
him several princes, but is unsure whether her eldest son will be designated
crown prince when her husband becomes emperor. The narrative then
turns back to focus on Nakatada, the grandson of the now-deceased
Toshikage, who passes on the musical secrets of his mother and himself
to his young daughter. The novel comes to an end with a grand concert at
Nakatada’s Kyōgoku residence, where his mother, his daughter, and he
himself perform for two retired emperors and many high-ranking courtiers,
their music causing thunder, lightning, and other celestial disturbances. All
present are moved to tears and the work concludes with a round of
promotions for Nakatada’s family.
The manuscripts of Utsuho include a large number of irregularly positioned
captions (around 130) for illustrations that are no longer extant, suggesting
they may represent some draft stage. Tamagami Takuya argued that mono-
gatari were always illustrated and that, until the Genji, the pictures were in
fact more important than the text. Utsuho is traditionally attributed to
Minamoto no Shitagō, one of the compilers of Gosenshū, though there is no
conclusive evidence. The work appears to have been written over a number
of years, commencing perhaps in the year 969 and concluding around 982.
The text includes a great number of poetry exchanges, including those at
formal events, when a string of some twenty verses will be “recorded.” In
fact, Marie J. Mueller has suggested that some of the sense of “realism” that
Utsuho seems to manifest may be due to the author’s use of the style of
recording diaries, which were made for occasions such as poetry contests

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(p. 164). Poems are also exchanged through letters, but there is now a greater
degree of dialogue between characters than seen in earlier works. But what is
most remarkable about Utsuho in comparison to earlier works is its length: a
modern edition runs three book-length volumes. The vernacular had now
proven itself capable of truly sustained narrative.
Somewhat shorter is Ochikubo monogatari, the final extant monogatari
dating from before The Tale of Genji. This is a very traditional tale of the
Cinderella type, the origins of which have been traced back to ninth-century
China. Chūnagon (Middle Counselor) has once been married to an imperial
princess, who has given him one beautiful daughter. The mother has died,
however, and he is now married to another woman, with whom he has
several daughters and sons. The first daughter lives with her father, step-
mother, and half-siblings. She is, however, mistreated by her stepmother,
who fears her superior looks and character will be detrimental to the
marriage prospects of her own daughters. She therefore treats her stepdaugh-
ter like a servant, relegating her to a kind of basement suite, or ochikubo, and
the girl becomes known as Lady Ochikubo. Ochikubo has one devoted
servant, who becomes involved with the retainer of a Lesser Captain,
Michiyori. Michiyori is in fact the son of Sadaishō (General of the Left), and
his sister is the emperor’s favorite consort. Michiyori is not yet married, and
his retainer, Korenari, one day tells him of Ochikubo’s plight. Michiyori
and Ochikubo start a relationship that is eventually discovered by the wicked
stepmother. Michiyori is at last able to steal the girl away, and installs her in
his residence as his principal wife.
The remainder of the tale divides into two halves: in the first, Michiyori
takes revenge on Ochikubo’s family for all the indignities it inflicted on her –
for example, stealing their room at Kiyomizu Temple during a pilgrimage,
and so forcing them to sleep in their carriages, which are said to be more
cramped than the basement room Ochikubo had been confined to. In the
second half, he compensates them for all the mischief he has done, reuniting
Ochikubo with her father, and providing promotions and good marriages to
all her half-siblings. True to the imperial bride-stealing motif, Michiyori’s
daughter eventually gives birth to a crown prince.
Like Taketori and Utsuho, the author of Ochikubo is believed to have been a
man, writing for a presumably female readership. The appeal of a rags-to-
riches story of a mistreated stepdaughter is apparent, and Ochikubo also
includes a number of pronouncements against polygyny. The tale proceeds
as if it is due to Ochikubo’s good fortune that the captain’s family succeeds
politically, finally placing Ochikubo’s daughters as chief consorts to both the

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emperor and the crown prince, though in fact this success is actually due to
typical marriage politics. Ochikubo’s good fortune is due to her imperial
blood, and she is the first of a number of misplaced imperial progeny whose
return to their “proper” social level will be the focus of later romances, such
as The Tale of Genji.

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 11
Genji monogatari and its reception
satoko naito

Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) was composed by Murasaki Shikibu

(d. c. 1014) around the first decade of the eleventh century. The tale’s fifty-four
chapters span three quarters of a century, intimately painting the intricacies of
Heian court culture. The Tale of Genji largely comprises episodic stories, but
there are clear overarching narratives and themes in the extensive romance,
which follows a fairly straightforward chronology. The book is divided into
two major sections: chapters 1 to 41, the story of Genji and the women in his
life, and chapters 42 to 54, which focus on Genji’s progeny. The primary section
can be further subdivided in two: chapters 1 to 33, telling the rise, fall, and rise
again of the young Genji, and chapters 34 to 41, which show him, at the height
of political power and social status, becoming increasingly contemplative and
introspective. Much of the story is narrated in the voice of a highly observant
and (perhaps overly) curious attendant lady, and thus honorifics are used for
high-ranking characters, though they are at times omitted to underscore the
intimacy of a scene. The tale is not a strict third-person narrative, as private
thoughts and emotions are depicted as if in the first person.
The story begins with a love affair between the emperor and Kiritsubo, a
kōi (junior consort) of “no great consequence.” Tormented by the vicious
jealousy of other consorts, she dies shortly after giving birth to a boy. The
emperor makes this son a commoner in order to remove him from the
unfavorable position of a prince with no maternal backing. He does so by
giving him the surname of Minamoto (the character for which is also read as
Gen, as in Genji). Hikaru Genji (Shining Genji), as readers have come to know
him, is the core of the story to come.
Captivated by her close resemblance to the late Kiritsubo, Genji’s
father takes in a new consort, known to us as Fujitsubo. This substitu-
tion of one woman for another is only the first of many instances of
surrogacy and repetition. Genji is told of Fujitsubo’s likeness to his late
mother, and begins to pine for her. Meanwhile, despite his disinterest in

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the matter, immediately after his coming-of-age ceremony Genji is wed

to Aoi, daughter of the Minister of the Left, thus forming a favorable
political alliance.

Rainy-night discussion and social rank

In the beginning of chapter 2 (“Hahakigi”) in a conversation traditionally
designated the amayo no shinasadame (rainy-night ranking of women), Genji,
now a young adult, has a lengthy debate about women with his lifelong friend
(and oftentimes rival) Tō no Chūjō, and two other men, both in abstract
terms and with specific anecdotes. They ultimately reach the conclusion that
there can be no single perfect lady. However, of the three aristocratic ranks –
royal and ministerial families; zuryō (provincial governor family) and similarly
classed women; and the rest – it is the women of the middle rank who fare
best. In particular, the most desirable prize is deemed to be a young woman
who is hidden away like a secret treasure. Genji seems to take this conclusion
to heart. Though Fujitsubo remains in his thoughts, the following day he is
already in pursuit of Utsusemi, a woman whose husband is an elderly
provincial governor of the middle rank. Genji has another opportunity for
adventure when he chances upon Yūgao (Evening Faces). He finds her shabby
dwelling in a neglected part of the city, hidden away as if waiting to be
discovered. Genji soon realizes that she may be a former lover of Tō no
Chūjō. She is fragile, however, and dies while she is with Genji, apparently
possessed by the spirit of a woman. The spirit seems to be that of the Rokujō
Lady, an older woman of high rank with whom Genji has had several trysts.
The two chapters “Utsusemi” and “Yūgao” (chapters 3 and 4), designated by
medieval scholars to be narabi (parallel) chapters, build upon the base chapter
of “Hahakigi” by playing out two distinct scenarios of a high-ranking man
pursuing women of the middle and lower ranks. Though the chapters can be
read autonomously, they function as supplements to the base chapter, and the
three together create a unified sequence. Other notable sequences include the
Wakamurasaki sequence (“Wakamurasaki” and “Suetsumuhana”, chapters 5
and 6) and the more lengthy Tamakazura sequence that begins with
“Tamakazura” (chapters 22–31).

Murasaki, Fujitsubo, and Genji’s rise

The tragic ending to Genji’s affair with Yūgao does not deter him from
pursuing women of the middle and lower ranks. In fact, she and Utsusemi are

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only two of several significant female characters who have intimate relation-
ships with men of considerably higher rank. Murasaki, whom Genji surrepti-
tiously discovers while on a short respite outside of the capital (chapter 5
“Wakamurasaki”), is one such example. He is able to see, by peering through
a gap in the fence to her abode (in a convention of kaimami, or “viewing
through the gap”), that she bears a certain likeness to Fujitsubo – and he later
finds out that she is her niece. After the death of her grandmother, Genji takes
her in and eventually marries the young girl (chapter 9 “Aoi”).
During the Heian period and especially by the eleventh century, marriage
between a man of Genji’s high rank and a woman of Murasaki’s inferior
station would have been nearly impossible. With a deceased low-ranking
mother and a father who did not publically recognize her, Murasaki has no
political backing of her own and has to depend entirely on Genji for social and
economic support. And yet he spares no effort in her education and cultiva-
tion, raising her as if she were his prized pupil. Murasaki’s gradual rise to the
position of principal wife is thus a social romance that would not have
happened in reality.
When Genji first takes her in, however, the young Murasaki is clearly a
consolation prize, a doll that he can take home in place of Fujitsubo. In fact, in
the same chapter in which Genji discovers Murasaki (“Wakamurasaki”), he
and his father’s consort have an illicit affair. This ultimately results in the birth
of a boy (chapter 7 “Momiji no ga”), presented to the world as the emperor’s
son. Horrified by their transgression Fujitsubo retreats even further out of
Genji’s grasp, but she remains his political ally for life. Their son eventually
succeeds to the throne as the Reizei emperor (chapter 14 “Miotsukushi”).
Genji and his principal wife Aoi also have a boy. However, immediately
after giving birth she dies, apparently having succumbed to the same myster-
ious apparition that killed Yūgao (chapter 9 “Aoi”). Genji is shocked to realize
that it is a living spirit of the Rokujō Lady. As the widow of a late crown
prince, Rokujō is of considerable status and suitable to be an official wife of
Genji – and yet, he continues to favor women of the middle and lower ranks.
Try as she might to contain her resentment, it is as if she cannot stop her
wandering spirit from protesting Genji’s lack of consistent attention. In
“Aoi,” Genji’s half-brother also ascends the throne to become Emperor
Suzaku, putting Suzaku’s mother, the Kokiden Lady, who has always
despised Genji and his mother, in a position of great influence.
Genji’s love affairs continue, but it is a specific dalliance with
Oborozukiyo – a sister to Kokiden and a woman slated to become consort
to Suzaku – that gets him into trouble (chapter 10 “Sakaki”). Genji goes into a

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voluntary exile, and in the “Suma” chapter (chapter 12) leaves the capital.
Genji’s banishment is reminiscent of several historical and legendary exiles,
including those of Ariwara no Yukihira (818–93) and Minamoto no Taka’akira
(914–82). It has also been identified as a narrative convention of kishu ryūri tan
(story of the young noble in exile), a phrase coined by modern scholar
Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953). In such stories the hero is forced to leave his
home and, after facing tribulations and experiencing personal growth,
returns to fanfare and triumph. Genji is aided greatly by supernatural forces;
his late father appears in a dream, instructing him to obey the god of
Sumiyoshi and leave Suma. He relocates to Akashi, where he is presented
to the daughter of an eccentric novice. Meanwhile his political enemies
experience illness and death. Genji is soon pardoned by the Suzaku emperor
and returns to the capital (chapter 13 “Akashi”).
Chapter 14 (“Miotsukushi”) lays the foundation of Genji’s astronomic rise
to dominance of the court. Political power is back in his favor; the Suzaku
emperor abdicates in favor of Reizei, Genji’s secret son, while Genji himself is
made a naidaijin (palace minister). The Fujitsubo Lady is the mother of the
new emperor, and thus takes power back from the Kokiden Lady’s faction.
The Akashi Lady bears Genji’s first and only daughter, who will grow up to
marry the crown prince and bear her own son (chapter 34 “Wakana jō”),
securing Genji’s eventual position as grandfather to an emperor. In
“Miotsukushi” Genji also heeds Rokujō’s dying wishes and vows to look
after her child as his own. He is instrumental in making this daughter,
Akikonomu, the future chūgū (empress) to Reizei. In “Otome” (chapter 21)
Genji rises still further to daijō daijin (chancellor) and completes a massive
residence covering four city blocks on the estate left to him by the Rokujō
Lady, where he brings together all of the significant women in his life,
including Murasaki, the Akashi Lady, and Akikonomu.
It is to this complex residence that Genji brings Tamakazura, daughter of
the late Yūgao. Though she is Tō no Chūjō’s biological daughter, he secretly
takes her in as his own. And just as he did with Murasaki, he attempts to
seduce her – though this time he is unsuccessful. The Tamakazura sequence
(chapters 22–31, “Tamakazura” through “Makibashira”) is also highly remi-
niscent of Genji’s numerous other pursuits of women of the middle and
lower ranks, most specifically of Yūgao.
One passage has gained much attention for its discussion of monogatari
(tales), history, and gender. In “Hotaru” (chapter 25), Genji debates the value
of monogatari with Tamakazura, who looks to the tales for consolation,
searching for a heroine that she can relate to. She rejects his mocking

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comment that tales are simply full of lies, whereupon Genji concedes that
there may in fact be more truth in them than in official histories. This so-
called monogatari-ron (discussion of the tale) has at times been taken for
author Murasaki Shikibu’s own defense of fiction, though we cannot forget
that Genji makes these statements while trying to seduce Tamakazura.
Meanwhile Genji’s political power only grows, until finally in chapter 33
(“Fuji no uraba”) he is given the fictional position of jun daijō tennō (honorary
retired emperor). This position, the only one in Genji with no historical
precedence, is significant particularly in light of the politics of Murasaki
Shikibu’s age. The tale is set roughly one century prior to her time, beginning
with the reign of Emperor Daigo (885–930, r. 897–930). This was an age before
the ascendancy of the sekkan (regency) system, when those of imperial blood
did not bow to ministers who wielded their power as maternal relatives of the
sitting emperor or heir apparent. The Tale of Genji shows, in the figure of
Genji, a commoner of imperial blood rising to a status above both the
emperor and the prime minister, thus capturing an impossible glory.
Genji’s life is now at its zenith, and what follows is a slow but steady
decline. What deteriorates is not his political fortunes, but rather his personal
life, and we find its seeds in chapter 34, part I of “Wakana.” In it the retired
Suzaku emperor, worried about his favorite daughter, requests that Genji
take her as a wife. He acquiesces and weds the Third Princess, but soon finds
her infinitely inferior to Murasaki. Though Murasaki has seen other women
come and go, she is overwhelmed by the lofty position of the Third Princess.
Her health deteriorates and she never recovers. The Third Princess, mean-
while, is pursued by the young courtier Kashiwagi, and bears a son to him
named Kaoru (chapter 35 “Wakana ge”). Genji, having discovered the truth of
the baby Kaoru’s parentage, wonders whether his own father too could have
known of his own duplicity years ago. Soon after, Murasaki dies, in “Minori”
(chapter 40), leaving Genji with little to live for. One full year passes after her
death (chapter 41 “Maboroshi”), after which we are met with a chapter title
with no content – “Kumogakure,” or “Vanished in the Clouds,” symbolizing
Genji’s death.

Uji chapters as sequel

“Niou no miya” (chapter 42) begins with the note that Genji has died. The
story now focuses on the lives of Kaoru and Genji’s grandson Niou, and
moves southeast from the capital to Uji and its reclusive residents: the Eighth
Prince and his two daughters. On a quest for spiritual illumination Kaoru

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seeks out the prince who, along with his daughters, has moved to Uji in
search of salvation (chapter 45 “Hashihime”). Already weary of the world,
Kaoru initially has no interest in the two women, but eventually comes to
know the elder sister Ōigimi. At this point the story begins once again to
replicate the paradigm of the hidden treasure, as the sisters are women who,
though of high birth, have been pushed to the periphery. Niou in turn courts
the younger sister Nakanokimi and marries her, but when their relationship
seems to stagnate, Ōigimi cannot but suspect that Kaoru’s pursuit too will
only end in disaster. Distraught at her belief that she has brought on their
ruin, Ōigimi stops eating and dies (chapter 47 “Agemaki”). Kaoru and Niou
then pursue Ukifune, a half-sister who shares the same father as Ōigimi and
Nakanokimi. Unable to stop their advances or decide between the two men,
the young woman attempts suicide by throwing herself in a river (chapter 51
“Ukifune”). Still alive, she is taken in by a nun, and later, with her identity still
unknown to the world, takes the tonsure (chapter 53 “Tenarai”). The tale
ends with Kaoru’s unsuccessful attempt to find her and take her back.
Though it may have been intentional, this ending is puzzling for its abrupt-
ness and lack of conclusiveness. Scholars have speculated that Murasaki may
have died before finishing her work.

Murasaki Shikibu the author

The woman now known as Murasaki Shikibu was born in the 970s into a mid-
ranking aristocratic family of the provincial governor class, one part of the
illustrious northern branch of the Fujiwara clan that held political dominance
for much of the mid-Heian period (794–1185). Her immediate family, how-
ever, possessed little political clout; her father Fujiwara no Tametoki (d. 1029)
held positions at the Shikibu shō (Bureau of Ceremonial) and served as
governor of Echizen and Echigo but was not a particularly successful bureau-
crat. He was better known as a poet and scholar of Chinese classics. Murasaki
Shikibu herself, while not as widely celebrated a poet as her contemporary
Izumi Shikibu (fl. c. 1000), composed waka later selected for imperial antholo-
gies like the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems,
c. 1205–21).
Murasaki Shikibu wed Fujiwara no Nobutaka (d. 1001), another mid-level
aristocrat, and gave birth to her daughter Kenshi (or Kataiko) around 999. She
likely began writing The Tale of Genji shortly after her husband’s death, and it
was probably the partially completed tale that brought her to the notice of
regent Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027). He hired her to serve as a nyōbō

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(lady-in-waiting) in the salon of his eldest daughter Shōshi (or Akiko, 988–
1074), consort to Emperor Ichijō (980–1011, r. 986–1011). Around this time the
Genji author came to be called by the sobriquet Murasaki Shikibu, the second
part of which designates the office once held by her father. (Though the
origin of “Murasaki” is less certain, most likely it derives from Lady Murasaki,
one of the major female characters in the tale, or is a tribute to the color of fuji
(wisteria) of her clan name.) She was one of many attendants in Shōshi’s
reputable salon, which helped bring cultural clout to the empress and, in
turn, to Michinaga. Other notable ladies-in-waiting were Izumi Shikibu and
Akazome Emon, author of Eiga monogatari (Tale of Flowering Fortunes).
Aside from The Tale of Genji and a collection of poetry (Murasaki Shikibu
shū, likely compiled shortly after her death), the author also left behind
Murasaki Shikibu nikki (Murasaki Shikibu Diary, c. 1010), which celebrates
the Kankō 5 (1008) birth of Shōshi’s son Atsuhira, the future Emperor
GoIchijō (r. 1016–36). The birth of this imperial prince secured Michinaga’s
political authority as the grandfather of a future emperor. The diary also
includes musings about herself and fellow attendants. She notes, for example,
that her father lamented that she was not born male, for she had formed a
better understanding of the Chinese classics than her own brother. She also
declares displeasure at the nickname Nihongi no mitsubone (Lady of the
Chronicles of Japan), instigated by a compliment by the emperor that the
author of Genji must be familiar with Nihon shoki (or Nihongi, Chronicles of
Japan, 720).
There have been persistent, if not always heated, debates about the
authorship of Genji. Scholars have pointed to the last third of the tale as
diverging enough in tone and language to indicate a different author. The
final chapters of the tale, so-called Uji jūjō (ten Uji books), have been
attributed to Murasaki’s daughter Kenshi (also known as Daini no Sanmi).
There is, however, no external proof to substantiate claims of alternate or
multiple authorship.

Commentaries and reception

The earliest documented evidence of Genji reading is found in the diary of the
author herself, which claims that figures like the renowned poet Fujiwara no
Kintō (966–1041), Michinaga, and the Ichijō Emperor read at least parts of The
Tale of Genji. Other references to sōshi (books) and monogatari suggest that by
1008 at least parts of The Tale of Genji were circulating at court. A more
extended depiction of Genji reception is found in the Sarashina nikki

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(Sarashina Diary by Takasue’s daughter, c. 1059), in which the narrator

describes her obsession with the tale as a girl. In the early years of reception
and production, the Genji was consumed largely, though not exclusively, by
women of the aristocracy.
As the Sarashina Diary suggests, The Tale of Genji probably started as a
cluster of chapters and gradually expanded, with sequels and additions
written as the author went along. The developing author’s maturity as a
writer is evident in later chapters. Themes are often repeated but at a deeper
and more profound level. The older Genji, for example, repudiates many
values celebrated in the first part.
The oldest surviving partial manuscript of the tale dates from the late
twelfth century and is found as accompaniment to the illustrations in Genji
monogatari emaki (Tale of Genji Picture Scroll). The first reliable manuscripts
are from later in the Kamakura period, of which two major lines have been
identified. The Kawachi-bon (Kawachi-text), named for the governor of
Kawachi Minamoto no Mitsuyuki (1163–1244) and his son Chikayuki
(d. 1277), was completed in 1255. Though initially more widely used, this
line has been largely overshadowed by the so-called Aobyōshi-bon (blue-cover
text) by Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). Teika’s text has been used by scholars
from Ichijō Kanera (or Kaneyoshi, 1402–81) to Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705) and
continues to be preferred by modern scholars. There is also a set of alternate
manuscripts, usually designated “other texts” (beppon).
In the late twelfth century Teika’s father Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204)
claimed that “a poet without knowledge of The Tale of Genji is regrettable” in
judging a poetry contest (Roppyakuban uta awase, The Six-Hundred-Round
Poetry Contest, 1193–4). Shunzei and Teika were both seminal in establishing
Genji as a sourcebook for waka, considered the most prestigious of native
literary genres and positioned far above the monogatari. Fujiwara no Teika
also composed a commentary on the Genji, titled Okuiri (Endnotes, c. 1233).
This was only one in an extensive tradition of Genji exegesis that began with
the 1160 composition of Genji shaku (Genji Explicated, by Sesonji Koreyuki
[d. 1175]), which focused largely on Genji’s poetic precedents.
Ascertaining the source of poetic and literary allusions remained a signifi-
cant component of the Genji exegetical tradition into the Muromachi period.
Yotsutsuji Yoshinari’s (1326–1402) Kakaishō (The River and Sea Commentary,
c. 1387) focused on identifying both poetic and historical precedents, and
declared that the Genji was based on the reigns of the emperors Daigo
(r. 897–930), Suzaku (r. 930–46), and Murakami (r. 946–67). It was also one
of the earliest studies to assert that, though Genji may seem to be full of

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amorous and immoral behavior, the author’s intention was to guide the
reader to Buddhist and Confucian truths.
The Kakaishō also popularized the story that Murasaki Shikibu wrote
the tale at Ishiyama Temple in present-day Shiga prefecture. This legend
states that the Daisai’in (Great Priestess of Kamo Shrine) Senshi (964–1035)
wished for a tale that departed from the likes of Taketori monogatari (The
Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, c. 909) and Utsuho monogatari (The Tale of
the Cavern, late tenth century). Entrusted with the composition of this
work, Murasaki Shikibu sought inspiration from Bodhisattva Kannon at
the Ishiyama Temple. Her prayers met, she successfully composed The
Tale of Genji. An early version of this story is found in the Mumyōzōshi
(Nameless Book, c. 1200–1), the oldest extant monogatari criticism, which
favorably assesses Genji and other tales. The Ishiyama legend, which
became popular in the medieval period, gives a Buddhistic legitimacy to
the tale while underscoring its imperial associations and declaring it to be
felicitously composed.
This insistence on a felicitous origin to Genji was in response to a prevailing
notion, especially popular during the medieval period, that Genji in particular
and monogatari in general were a violation of the Buddhist precept forbid-
ding fictitious speech and ornate language (kyōgen kigo). In another legend
that appeared as early as the twelfth century, Murasaki Shikibu is said to have
fallen to hell for her sins of writing the tale. Ceremonies were dedicated to
bring salvation to the Genji author in stories of Genji kuyō (Genji Offerings).
From early on in its life the Genji was celebrated for its poetry and poetics, but
there was a pervasive anxiety regarding its fictionality.
By the mid-Muromachi period, political and financial power had shifted
from the aristocracy to the warrior class. The newly empowered sought to
assert their legitimacy by appropriating Heian aristocratic culture, as exem-
plified by The Tale of Genji. The tale became a sourcebook not only for waka
but also for renga (linked verse), the emerging dominant poetic genre of the
period. (See Lewis Cook’s chapter 13 below on medieval commentaries for
more on Genji commentaries.) In addition we find the first Genji digests, like
Genji kokagami (A Small Mirror of Genji, fourteenth century), which culled
representative poems and provided simplified plot synopses. Beginning in the
mid seventeenth century, these Genji Mirrors included illustrations depicting
selected scenes and characters, as found in Eiri Genji monogatari (Illustrated
Tale of Genji, 1650). Such intermediary media greatly assisted in disseminat-
ing Genji to a wider audience. A significant body of noh plays based on Genji
characters (almost entirely female) also emerged in the late medieval period,

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with the playwrights drawing heavily on Genji lexical associations found in

renga handbooks.
The early Edo period witnessed the first major Genji boom, with the
production of annotated texts and digests, illustrated texts with abridged
stories, and new commentaries including the Kogetsushō (The Moon on the
Lake Commentary, 1673) by Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705). The Kogetsushō
contained extensive annotation and headnotes including citations from the
major medieval commentaries, but it was most notable in providing the
entirety of the Genji text in print. It became the most influential Genji
commentary of the Edo period and was still widely used into the modern era.
There were also numerous treatises written by Confucian scholars, includ-
ing Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91), who declared that Genji taught Confucian
virtues (Genji gaiden, c. 1673). One incident in particular was of great concern
both to Confucians and later to Kokugaku scholars: the affair between Genji
and Fujitsubo and the eventual ascension of their son to the imperial throne,
often referred to simply as mono no magire (the disturbance). This was a
source of major contention for scholars who deemed that this aberration was
blasphemous in its denial of an unbroken imperial line. Andō Tameakira
(1659–1716) countered in Shika shichiron (Seven Essays of Murasaki, 1703) that,
rather than being an unspeakable fault within the tale, the “incident” of
Reizei’s birth and enthronement were a “lesson” meant to forewarn the
court from any future disruptions of this type. Furthermore, as the grandson
of an emperor, Reizei is still of imperial blood, indicating the imperial line has
not been tainted.
The priest Keichū (1640–1701), later celebrated as a founding Kokugaku
scholar, argued that the tale was not simply a didactic one (Genchū shūi,
Addenda to Genji, 1696). His critical reading of older scholarship was identi-
fied later as the beginning of the shinchū (new commentaries). Motoori
Norinaga (1730–1801) further challenged the notion that Genji should be
valued as moral instruction (in a Confucian or Buddhist framework), arguing
that the amorous affairs and transgressions depicted in Genji were meant to
show and elicit profound human emotion, what he calls the understanding of
mono no aware (pathos of things), particularly empathy for others. Norinaga’s
view allowed for an understanding of the tale that did not value it based on
upholding Confucian morals or Buddhist ideals.
Two texts stand out in scope of dissemination and longevity of popularity:
Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–93) Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Life of an Amorous Man,
1682), an ukiyo zōshi (books of the floating world) that tells in fifty-four
chapters of an urban commoner and his multitude of lovers, and Nise

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Murasaki Inaka Genji (Fake Murasaki’s Bumpkin Genji, 1829–42, by Ryūtei

Tanehiko [1783–1842]), a long-running and extremely popular gōkan (com-
bined booklet) read far into the Meiji period (1868–1912).
The modern period saw new translations, studies, and theatrical depictions
of The Tale of Genji. Consumption and various re-imaginings of the Genji are
very much alive today. There have been numerous adaptations and retellings
on live-action and animated television, musical and dramatic theater, novels,
short stories, and manga. None of these modern renderings would have been
possible without the long history of Genji commentary and translation. The
first translation into modern Japanese was completed by Yosano Akiko
(1878–1942) with Shin’yaku Genji monogatari (New Translation of Tale of
Genji, 1912–13), followed by many more translations, most notably by
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) and Enchi Fumiko (1905–86). In English,
Suematsu Kenchō (1855–1920) published the first partial translation in 1882,
succeeded by a more complete and extremely influential translation by
Arthur Waley (1925–33). Edward Seidensticker (1976), Royall Tyler (2001),
and most recently Dennis Washburn (2015) have produced full English
translations of The Tale of Genji.

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Post-Tale of Genji tales

No evidence of new monogatari survives for the half century after the
completion of Genji. In 1055, however, Imperial Princess Baishi (1039–96),
daughter of Emperor GoSuzaku, and priestess of the Kamo Shrine from 1046
until 1058, sponsored a monogatari-awase, or contest between literary
romances. Eighteen short tales were written by ladies-in-waiting, only one
of which has survived: Ōsaka koenu Gon Chūnagon (The Provisional Middle
Counselor Who Did Not Cross over the Hill of Meeting), attributed to one
Lady Koshikibu. “The Provisional Middle Counselor” is today included in a
collection of short fiction, Tsutsumi Chūnagon monogatari (The Riverside
Counselor’s Stories), assembled at an unknown date. The eight tales con-
jectured to be written by women in this collection are the only evidence
remaining of what may have been a significant number of shorter court
romances produced during the late Heian and Kamakura periods.

Sagoromo monogatari
Much longer fiction survives from Baishi’s day as well, and one of her
attendants, Senji (d. 1092), is credited with Sagoromo monogatari, dated to
sometime between 1069 and 1086. Throughout the premodern period
Sagoromo appears to have been read and appreciated, enjoying a reputation
second only to the Genji and being particularly valued for its poetry. The tale
exists in some seventy different texts in as many as 120 manuscripts; one
version was printed in the Edo period.
The influence of Genji is discernible on the very first page of Sagoromo, as
the eponymous hero alludes to a poem by Genji himself. The main conflict of
the entire tale, however, is a vast elaboration of Episode 49 of The Ise Stories,
where the man reveals his erotic interest to his younger sister. This episode
had already been used in Genji, between Prince Niou and his half-sister the

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First Princess, and indeed the object of Sagoromo’s infatuation, Genji no

Miya, is explicitly likened to the First Princess of Genji. Sagoromo’s inces-
tuous predicament, however, is of an unusual kind, as Genji no Miya is not in
fact related to him by blood, but is simply a foster-sibling.
Again we have one more young noble pining for a seemingly unattainable
woman, much like Genji for Asagao or Kaoru for the First Princess. Readers
seem to have been far more interested, however, in the major sub-plot, when
Sagoromo rescues a young female orphan, Asukai, from a lecherous priest
and then falls in love with her. The character is clearly modeled on that of
Genji’s Yūgao, which dictates that she is destined for an early death, after
giving birth to a daughter. What is interesting about this rewriting of Genji
motifs, however, is how much it differs from the earlier tale. There is, for
example, a mixing of social ranks that never happens in Genji: ladies of Genji
take no exception to their men sleeping with the servants, confident in the
knowledge that those women’s lower social status precludes them from
being a threat to the principal wives. In Sagoromo, however, the “hero”
loses Asukai and ruins the life of an imperial princess because he is unwilling
for Genji no Miya to learn that he has been with anyone else, whatever her
social status.
Extant monogatari following Genji all seem to be influenced most by the
tale’s last chapters, the so-called “Ten Uji Chapters” (Uji jūjō). And those
chapters depict a somewhat different and harder world than that of the
Shining Prince: men’s affairs with the serving women are candidly revealed;
the mechanics of sexual coercion are more fully shown; and the relationship
between the principal ladies and their female attendants becomes more
fraught, edging toward the adversarial. It is this last characteristic that is
most apparent in the Asukai sub-plot, as the girl’s sole support, her wet-nurse,
actively works against her relationship with Sagoromo and ends up succeed-
ing in having her kidnapped by another man. Middle-ranking characters are
also explicitly critical of their social betters in a way not found in The Tale of
Genji.
Not only does Sagoromo reprise the Nakazumi motif from Utsuho, but it
also has magical koto-playing: Sagoromo is so skilled that his parents prevent
him from playing, but one night the emperor insists; as Sagoromo plays, a
celestial child descends and attempts to lead him away to the heavens.
Sagoromo declines, and in reward the emperor bestows on him his beloved
Second Princess. Sagoromo’s parents are delighted with the match, but
Sagoromo passively resists. Finally, however, he steals in on her one night
and makes love to her. But again, because of his fear of Genji no Miya, he

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does not reveal himself. The princess immediately becomes pregnant and,
shortly after giving birth, takes the tonsure.
Sagoromo now has two children: the daughter by Asukai, whereabouts
unknown, and a son by the Second Princess; he still, however, has no wife,
longing only for Genji no Miya. She, however, is made the Kamo Priestess,
further removing her from his grasp. Book Three ends with a long descrip-
tion of Genji no Miya’s removal to the Kamo Shrine, written obviously by
someone who was an eye-witness to such an event. We are told that in his
depression Sagoromo has resolved to become a monk.
The final book was the least appreciated by later readers. Sagoromo’s
father manages to stop him from taking the tonsure. Sagoromo’s depression
continues, until he meets a woman who looks exactly like Genji no Miya,
resurrecting the yukari or katashiro (substitute) motif from Genji. The reign-
ing emperor wants to abdicate, but has no heir (imperial succession problems
are conspicuous in later monogatari). As various possibilities are being
considered, the Ise Priestess receives an oracle that the throne should be
passed to Sagoromo. He is enthroned, and makes the Genji no Miya look-
alike his consort. The last episode shows Sagoromo visiting retired emperor
Saga, where the Second Princess is living, and forcing an interview on her
where in tears he begs her forgiveness. Sagoromo’s devotion to Genji no
Miya is the engine that seems responsible for destroying a number of
women’s lives, and one can only wonder whether his apparent remorse at
the end, despite his exalted status, was fully satisfying for female readers.

Yoru no Nezame
In the postscript to his copy of the Sarashina nikki (Sarashina Diary), the
famous poet and scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) records the attribution
of four monogatari to the diary’s author, known as Sugawara no Takasue’s
Daughter (b. 1008), two of which are still extant: Yoru no Nezame (also read as
Yowa no Nezame) and Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari. While postwar scho-
lars tended to discount this attribution, twenty-first-century scholarship
seems to be more accepting of it.
Yoru no Nezame (Wakefulness/Nezame at Night), dated to the end of the
eleventh century, appears to take its title from the last line of the last extant
volume: yoru no nezame tayuru yo naku to zo (“it is said that there was no end to
her nights of anguished wakefulness”), which also gives the name to the chief
protagonist, Nezame, the daughter of a former imperial prince, now the
chancellor (daijō daijin). No complete copy of Nezame exists among the eight
extant manuscripts, all dating from the Edo period.

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The theme of the tale is announced in its opening words: “Of all the stories
about relations between men and women, rarely has one brought with it
such sleepless nights for its lovers as that which I am about to tell. Although
their bond was deep, it brought much pain.” It is not until well into Book One
that the reader will understand that the couple referred to in this opening are
Nezame and the son of the Regent (kanpaku), the Provisional Middle
Counselor (Gon-chūnagon, hereafter referred to as Chūnagon), when we
first meet him. Nezame is the youngest daughter of the Chancellor and so
musically talented that in her dreams a celestial being teaches her secret
pieces (echoing themes from both Utsuho and Sagoromo).
In Nezame’s sixteenth year, her father is in search of a husband for her
older sister, Ōigimi, concluding that the only man worthy of the honor is the
Chūnagon. It being considered an unlucky year for Nezame, she is sent off
with an older cousin, Tai no Kimi (in fact, the unwilling bed-partner of
Nezame’s father), to a villa in the southern Ninth Ward. Borrowing more
than one page from Genji, Chūnagon is visiting his old nurse next door and,
drawn by the sounds of Nezame’s koto, he sees her, and makes love to her,
not revealing his own identify and believing her to be the daughter of the
lesser-ranking Governor of Tajima. He shortly learns that the woman he
made love to is the younger sister of the woman he has just married and into
whose father’s house he has just moved. Nezame herself has become preg-
nant from her night with Chūnagon. Nezame stays bed-ridden to hide her
pregnancy and is at last taken to Ishiyama Temple where she gives birth to a
girl. Chūnagon takes the girl to be raised by his own parents, and Nezame
returns to her father’s house, apparently cured. Her father now retires from
court and lives with Nezame in Hirosawa as a lay priest (Genji Nyūdō).
The middle part of the tale is missing. In the third part, the emperor
continues his attempts to get Nezame to join him at court. She instead
presents him with her youngest stepdaughter, Kan no Kimi, whom she
unwisely accompanies. At court she experiences the hostility of the empress
dowager, the mother-in-law of Chūnagon, whom the empress dowager
detests for neglecting her daughter due to his infatuation with Nezame. To
try to force a divide between Nezame and her daughter’s husband, the
empress dowager engineers that the emperor spend a night with Nezame,
though she successfully resists him. This move, in fact, only succeeds in
driving Nezame to Chūnagon for help in escaping from court. In apparent
compensation, the emperor summons Nezame’s young son, Masako, and
keeps him constantly by his side. Chūnagon assumes that Nezame’s accep-
tance of his protection will allow them to make their relationship public, but

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Nezame’s “childishness” makes her still fear her father’s disapproval, along
with the continued animosity of the empress dowager.
Chūnagon’s wife falls ill and rumors spread that her illness is due to
possession by Nezame’s angry spirit. Chūnagon views the matter as a hoax,
but Nezame too hears of the rumors and wonders what he thinks of them.
She retires to her father’s house in Hirosawa, falls ill, and finally convinces
him to allow her to become a nun. Alerted, Chūnagon rushes to Hirosawa
with their two children and reveals their long on-again, off-again relationship
to her father, who is so delighted with his new grandchildren – especially the
girl – that he more or less abandons his religious devotions: it is apparent that
he is now consumed with plans for the girl to achieve what her mother could
not, the position of empress. Nezame realizes that now her father will never
let her become a nun. She must return to the capital and assume the role of a
secondary wife in relation to Ichi no Miya. And indeed, for the sake of
propriety, Chūnagon spends twice as many nights with the princess as with
Nezame. The final, lost part of the tale can only be partially reconstructed.
Nezame is distinctive in that it is named for a female protagonist, rather
than centered on a male hero, such as Genji or Sagoromo. The text is also
much closer to the introspective diary (nikki) genre than any other extant
romance. We are privy to all the characters’ thoughts as they interpret and
conjecture as to the intentions of others – usually incorrectly. Matters are
little helped by the fact that internal monologue reveals that almost every
utterance by any character to be in truth contrary to what they are actually
thinking or feeling. And we are provided with far more of their verbatim
thoughts or speeches than in other works: whereas in Genji the narrator will
simply say that Genji convinced the woman with a persuasive speech, in
Nezame the man’s blandishments are given word-for-word, as are the
tortuous inner monologues of all the characters. Despite Nezame’s
repeated pregnancies with her lover, there is less explicit description than
in Sagoromo, though there are discussions of pregnant bodies and wizened
newborns. The malevolent empress dowager is in a line of characters
starting with Kokiden in Genji and the empress-mother of the Second
Princess in Sagoromo. Nezame herself can be seen as descendant of the
passionate women-poets Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, whose
poems are often alluded to. Although men still pursue women, there is
much less of the explicit threatening seen in Sagoromo or Uji jūjō. While
other monogatari (such as Ise and Genji) are able to convey the experiences
of women despite – or through – their focus on a male protagonist, Nezame
in some ways seems to represent the extreme feminization of the genre.

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Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari

Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari (after 1058) provides a conspicuously differ-
ent approach to character than Nezame, displaying a refreshing outspoken-
ness among the characters. This is made possible by the setting of the first
part of the tale, remarkably, in China. As the protagonist remarks: “It seems it
is the custom in this country to speak one’s mind directly.” The narration
encompasses only six years, and there is an almost complete disregard for the
issue of advancement of rank for the male characters; indeed, the protagonist,
the son of an imperial prince, now a Minamoto, remains a middle counselor
throughout the entire tale (hamamatsu, or “pine on the beach” comes from
one of his poems early on). In fact, the action of the tale takes places almost
entirely outside of court, with very few appearances by the emperor or other
members of the imperial family, save one.
The first book of Hamamatsu has been lost. From other sources the basic
plot action can be reconstructed: the hero Chūnagon learns that his father has
been reborn as the Third Prince of China. After he leaves for China, Ōigimi,
his step-sister, discovers she is pregnant by Chūnagon, even though she has
been promised in marriage to Prince Shikibukyō, a philanderer tipped to
become the next heir apparent in the tradition of the Genji’s Prince Niou. She
cuts off her hair and renounces the world, while her younger sister, Naka no
Kimi, is married to the prince in her stead.
The extant text opens with Chūnagon arriving in China. Women in the
Heian period were largely excluded from Chinese literature, which was seen
as the preserve of government and men. Moreover, with the last embassy to
the mainland in the early ninth century, Japanese culture is often thought to
have entered a period of “Japanification,” turning away from continental
culture and developing an individual indigenous culture, of which mono-
gatari, written in Japanese by women, was a conspicuous component.
However, many aristocratic women were literate in Chinese and knowledge
of a fair-sized corpus of Chinese poems and stories was essential for any
aristocratic woman’s cultural literacy. The author’s descriptions of China are
all drawn from such a literary cache. Contact with China was also not
negligible, sustained through trade and the dispatching of monks for training.
Most intriguingly, considering the plot of Hamamatsu, in 1026 a trader named
Zhou Liangshi was patronized by Michinaga’s son, Yorimichi (992–1074).
Zhou claimed to have been born of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother
and requested recognition as a Japanese subject (Verschuer, 41).

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In China, Chūnagon meets the Third Prince and the two immediately
recognize each other as former father and son. The prince is the son of the
Hoyang Consort, a Lady Kiritsubo-like figure who, though loved best by the
emperor, is forced from court by the jealousy of the prime minister’s
daughter – chief consort and mother of the crown prince. The Hoyang
Consort is in fact the daughter of a Japanese princess by a Chinese ambassa-
dor in Japan, who brought her back to China when his mission was over. She
and all her ladies-in-waiting consequently seem thoroughly Japanese in
behavior – not a few Chinese are shown to be capable of writing waka in
the tale! One night, drawn by the sound of a biwa, Chūnagon discovers a
beautiful woman and makes love to her, without discovering who she is.
Eventually he learns that it was the Consort and that she has become
pregnant by him. The first book ends with their brief reunion, where the
Consort gives Chūnagon their infant son to take back with him to Japan. The
consort also gives him a letter to take back to her mother in Japan.
In chapter 2 Chūnagon is back in Japan and is shocked to learn of Ōigimi’s
fate and immediately establishes one of the most conspicuous aspects of the
tale, a kind of sexless companionate marriage: “At night they set their bed-
ding together and talked of the past and present, weeping, laughing, and
forever vowing to each other that in the next world they would be born again
on the same lotus leaf” (126).
In chapter 3 Chūnagon tracks down the Consort’s mother deep in the
mountains of Yoshino. There he also finds that the Consort has a half-sister,
Yoshino-hime. Chūnagon looks to mother’s and daughter’s physical needs
but, in a no doubt deliberate anthithesis to Genji, Chūnagon evinces no
sexual interest in Yoshino-hime, despite her presumed resemblance to her
half-sister the Consort. At the end of the chapter Chūnagon’s happy state of
affairs with Ōigimi is threatened by the emperor’s offer of one of his
daughters in marriage. Unlike Genji, Chūnagon finds no pleasure in the offer.
In the following chapter Chūnagon delays his marriage and, after the death
of her mother, moves Yoshino-hime to the capital where he cares for her like
a daughter, but, as with Genji and Tamakazura, finds himself falling in love
with her. Yoshino-hime suddenly falls ill and is taken to Kiyomizu Temple,
giving Prince Shikibukyō the chance to abduct her. However, her continued
illness forces him, on the girl’s insistence, to call for Chūnagon, who takes her
to his home, where she is now believed to be Chūnagon’s half-sister. He finds
himself increasingly attracted to her – the sibling-incest motif. Although
Yoshino-hime yields to Chūnagon in all other things, she rejects his sexual
advances and Chūnagon resorts to no degree of coercion. The book ends

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with Chūnagon yet again in tears as a letter confirms the Hoyang Consort’s
death. He has also learned in a dream that a woman he has impregnated is
carrying the reincarnation of the Consort.
For the author, Chūnagon is clearly the ideal man, superior even to the
Genji’s Kaoru, most particularly for his devotion to Ōigimi despite no possi-
bility of sexual consummation. As noted, we see none of the threats and
coercion exercised by Kaoru in his relationship with his own Ōigimi. There is
also a conscious working away from the katashiro trope, set off by the explicit
use of reincarnation.

Torikaebaya monogatari
The final monogatari extant from the Heian period is a bellwether of things
to come. Torikaebaya monogatari (The Story of “Oh, if I could only exchange
them!”) tells of a Minister of the Left (sadaijin) with a son and a daughter by
different wives. The boy, however, acts like a girl, while his sister behaves like
a boy. Sadaijin therefore has them switch roles. As a boy, the girl is phenom-
enally successful in court society and it is this character that is the main focus
of the story. The “boy” is the most superior of courtiers and eventually
reaches the rank of chūnagon. The emperor soon abdicates to the crown
prince but the latter, having no son, appoints his own daughter as heir
apparent. Sadaijin now suggests that his “daughter” serve the crown princess
and “she” enters the all-female court as Naishi no Kami. In the meantime,
Sadaijin has agreed to Chūnagon’s marriage to Yon (or Shi) no Kimi, the
daughter of the Minister of the Right (udaijin). We are presented with a
reprise of the sexless but companionate marriage depicted in Hamamatsu and,
knowing no better, Yon no Kimi makes no complaint and learns to love
Chūnagon. At court, Chūnagon becomes friends with Saishō, the son of the
emperor’s uncle, establishing a relationship similar to that between Kaoru
and Niou. Like Niou, Saishō is the incorrigible irogonomi of the tale and soon
forces himself on Yon no Kimi, making her pregnant. To maintain appear-
ances, Chūnagon must pretend the child is his.
A figure very much like Genji’s Eighth Prince is then introduced. He had
traveled to China, where he married a woman who gave him two daughters.
She died, however, and he returned to Japan with his children where he was
shortly accused of having designs on the throne, forcing him to take the
tonsure and retire to the mountains of Yoshino. Like the nun in Hamamatsu,
he is now waiting for the appearance of a man who will take on the care of his
daughters so that the prince can devote himself to his prayers. Enter the
dissatisfied Chūnagon, looking for a means of renouncing the world. The

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prince, however, dissuades Chūnagon from abandoning society, insisting

that “he” is destined for high position. On the other hand, the prince (unlike
Genji’s Akashi Priest) has no ambitions for his daughters, but is grateful when
Chūnagon agrees to be responsible for them. Chūnagon becomes “intimate”
with them, insisting that they think of “him” as another sister. Again, an ideal
(sexless) companionate marriage is portrayed between Chūnagon and the
eldest princess.
As in Genji, there are several instances when a man looks at Chūnagon and
is struck by “his” beauty, wishing there were a woman like him. One summer
day Saishō calls on Chūnagon at home, continuing to insist that he be
introduced to Chūnagon’s “sister,” Naishi no Kami. Chūnagon is largely
unclothed due to the heat and in clutching “him” to himself in the midst of
his protestations of love for his “sister,” Saishō discovers Chūnagon’s true sex
and rapes her.
Book Two opens with a pregnant Chūnagon preparing to disappear,
putting herself in Saishō’s hands to be hidden away at Uji. Once there, she
starts dressing as a woman. Chūnagon’s father confronts Yon no Kimi’s father
with her adultery – she is once again pregnant by Saishō – and disowns her.
This puts Saishō in a position reminiscent of Genji between the pregnant
Third Princess and the ill Murasaki, rushing back and forth between Uji and
the capital, comforting both pregnant women. In the end, Chūnagon gives
birth to a boy, and Saishō’s repeated absences due to Yon no Kimi’s difficult
pregnancy allow Chūnagon to abandon her baby at Uji and flee to the prince
in Yoshino. Chūnagon’s disappearance galvanizes Naishi no Kami, who
leaves the palace in male clothing to search for his sibling, despite the fact
that “she” has made the crown princess pregnant. Once the siblings meet,
they decide to exchange each other’s place in society and tutor each other in
their new gender roles.
At the beginning of Book Three the new Naishi no Kami returns to the
palace. She gives her brother access to the princess. In a historically unpre-
cedented move, the princess gives birth in the imperial palace (an act thought
to be ritually defiling), and the resulting son is spirited away for keeping by
the siblings’ mother. Shortly thereafter the emperor introduces himself into
Naishi no Kami’s bedchamber. Despite discovering that she is not a virgin,
the emperor is completely smitten and she soon becomes his favorite
consort.
Chūnagon brings the Yoshino princesses to the capital in grand style,
making the elder his principal wife. He installs her in his new residence,
with another wing for Yon no Kimi, and a third for the crown princess. Nashi

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no Kami gives birth to a son, who is soon named crown prince, cementing
Chūnagon’s family’s control over the throne. In the final pages the narrative
focuses on “the Uji boy” who still does not know who his mother was (a
reversal of Kaoru’s problem about his father). The empress hints to him that
it is she herself, which, overhearing, relieves the emperor, who had feared
that her deflowerer was someone of low status! The tale ends with the
younger generation succeeding to various important offices, the final
words relating Saishō’s unrelieved “sorrow, pain, and longing” for the for-
ever-lost “Chūnagon.”
Torikaebaya has as one of its main themes the punishment of the irogonomi
playboy, who, through his profligacy, ends up essentially alone. In addition to
apparently demonstrating the socially constructed nature of gender, it also
provides clear cases of homogender, if not homosexual, desire: when Saishō
attacks Chūnagon, he is under the mistaken belief that the latter is a man.
While it is not clear in Genji what the frequent comparison of the hero’s looks
to those of a woman means, in Torikaebaya there is a clear homoerotic
element that is rather implausibly “heteroized.” This trend is further devel-
oped in the following period.

Monogatari in the Kamakura period (1185–1333)

In the Heian period, monogatari as a genre had been generally denigrated as
worthless fabrications written to help women pass the time. Starting in the
1190s, however, its status began to rise dramatically, due to poets, especially
of the Mikohidari house, starting to participate in their composition and,
most importantly, insisting that a knowledge of Genji was mandatory for the
writing of waka. This championing seems to be due at least in part to the
rivalry between the Mikohidari and Rokujō schools, the latter founding their
expertise on their knowledge of the archaic Man’yōshū. This competition led
to some of the men associated with the Mikohidari creating new monogatari
in the 1190s, and Teika – on the request of the powerful regent Yoshitsune
(1169–1206) – compiled two one-hundred-poem contests (uta-awase), one
matching one hundred poems from Genji against an equal number from
Sagoromo; and another matching another hundred poems from Genji against
those of ten other monogatari, including Nezame and Torikaebaya.
Critical consideration of the genre reached one peak around 1201 with the
writing of the Mumyōzōshi, or “Untitled Book.” This work is attributed to
Shunzei’s Daughter (in fact, his granddaughter, whom he adopted; c. 1171–after
1252). It is comprised of a fictional conversation between an elderly nun and

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several ladies-in-waiting. The discussion proceeds to consider many of Genji’s

characters and events, which then leads to assessments of other monogatari,
both old and recent. As suggested by Teika’s uta-awase, Sagoromo is ranked
second only to Genji. Specific poems come in for praise, while specific events –
such as Sagoromo becoming emperor – receive sharp criticism as excessively
unrealistic. Nezame engenders more disagreement among the ladies in terms of
assessing the heroine’s behavior, but seventeen poems are quoted from the
tale, far more than the five from Sagoromo. The faults listed come from the
now-lost last chapter.
While Hamamatsu is admitted to be inferior to both Nezame and Sagoromo,
its hero is praised as ideal: “He’s a wonderful man, the same type as Captain
Kaoru.” After various touching scenes involving each of the chief female
characters are mentioned, this tale is briefly criticized for such matters as
having the Hoyang Consort reborn so soon, when her life in the
Trāyastrim· śa heaven should last eons.
From Mumyōzōshi we learn that there seems to have been the practice of
rewriting, or updating, older monogatari (kaisaku monogatari). The case they
discuss is Torikaebaya which, in its original version, contained many scenes
that the ladies found distasteful, such as the female Chūnagon giving birth
while still dressed as a man – as we have seen, in the “New” Torikaebaya (Ima
torikaebaya), she has already changed to women’s wear when she delivers.
The new version is declared superior, Kami no Naishi praised, and Yon no
Kimi and Saishō thoroughly criticized.
Another monogatari that exists only in its later rewriting, not discussed in
Mumyōzōshi, is Sumiyoshi monogatari, thought to date from the Kamakura
period. Mention of the tale in both Genji and the Pillow Book indicates that
some version existed in the mid-Heian period, but the extant text clearly
dates from a later period. It is a wicked stepmother tale (mamako ijime-tan)
along the lines of Ochikubo. Again, a girl with a dead imperial mother is placed
with her hostile stepmother and siblings. When the princess (himegimi)
attracts the attention of a well-placed young man, the stepmother tricks
him into marrying one of her daughters instead (a reversal of a plot device
in Ochikubo). In fact, the mother frustrates the marriage of the heroine and
hero three times, until the girl flees to Sumiyoshi, thinking of becoming a
nun. But her lover is guided to her by a dream and brings her back to the
capital as his wife. The tale shows its medieval character most in its ending,
which explicitly frames the story as a morality tale.
Of the twenty-four monogatari discussed in Mumyōzōshi, only ten are
extant, giving one a measure of the amount of material lost. On the other

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hand, four of those extant are among the most highly prized by the ladies,
suggesting that the cream of the crop has perhaps been preserved.
The ladies distinguish between older works and those contemporary with
them, in which context they mention Ukinami (not extant) by the poet and
painter Fujiwara no Takanobu (1142–1205), suggesting that the new mono-
gatari too may well have been illustrated. They also credit Teika with “many”
(amata) monogatari, mentioning the extant Matsura no miya monogatari by
name.

Matsura no miya monogatari

Matsura no miya monogatari is remarkable in many ways. It is set not in the
Heian court, but when the court was at Fujiwara (694–710), before the
establishment of the capital in Nara. The first part of the tale imitates
Utsuho and alludes to many poems from the Man’yōshū – as if Teika were
contesting the Rokujō’s exclusive mastery of this text. Moreover, despite the
Mikohidari house’s championing of Genji, Matsura attempts to distance itself
from this classic as much as possible.
The story opens by introducing the protagonist, Tachibana no Ujitada.
Like all monogatari heroes, he excels in beauty and skill. At sixteen he falls in
love with Princess Kannabi, but she is sent to serve at court, nipping any
romance in the bud. Shortly thereafter, Ujitada is assigned to the embassy to
China. He is enthusiastically received by the thirty-year-old Chinese
emperor, who makes Ujitada something of a favorite, keeping him constantly
at his side. Once the setting changes to China, many passages appear to be
drawn from Chinese historical works, such as the Han shu (History of the
Former Han Dynasty, completed 111) – a work that would be beyond the
education of most court women.
Ujitada begins to secretly study the seven-stringed kin with Princess Hua-
yang, who is in retreat on Mount Shang. Then the emperor falls ill.
Foretelling his own death, he implores Ujitada to stay in China, loyal to the
infant crown prince and empress, to guide the country through its impending
crisis. Ujitada returns to Mount Shang, where Princess Hua-yang gives him
his final lesson. She then gives him a jewel that he is to keep in his constant
possession, and makes love to him, knowing that this will result in her death,
but will allow her to reappear in Japan when Ujitada returns home. Book One
ends with the emperor, too, dying; an insurrection instigated by the King of
Yen; and the court fleeing the capital with the infant emperor, the empress
dowager, and Ujitada, in a scene reminiscent of the Taira flight from the
Heian capital with the infant emperor Antoku in 1185.

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Book Two opens with significant borrowings from Bo Juyi’s Changhen-ge

(Song of Never-Ending Sorrow, J. Chōgonka, 806) and its description of the An
Lushan Rebellion (755–63). The emperor’s army is pursued by the rebel army.
It is the empress who devises an ambush and Ujitada who leads the imperial
army. In the midst of battle he is suddenly aided by nine identical magical
warriors and together they rout the enemy – we discover later that the
warriors have been sent by the deity of Sumiyoshi.
With the emperor reestablished, Ujitada still has to wait out the manda-
tory three-year duration of the embassy. Again following the sound of music,
he is led to a beautiful and mysterious woman. He approaches her and she
yields willingly to his embraces, making love without uttering a word, a
device taken from the episode with the Ise Priestess in The Ise Stories. Like
Narihira in Episode 4, Ujitada returns the following night, but the woman is
not to be seen. So begins a series of encounters, heavily indebted to
Hamamatsu, with Ujitada very much in the traditional role of the waiting
woman, sleeplessly wondering when his mysterious lover will next visit him,
and her departing each time by literally disappearing (modeled on the god-
dess of Mount Wu making love to a king, as described in the Gao Tang fu),
leaving behind only her unique scent. In the final book, the empress dowager
reveals to Ujitada that she is his mystery lover, giving him a magic mirror.
Ujitada returns to Japan and, performing a ritual at Hatsuse Temple taught to
him by Princess Hua-yang, causes her to appear. He takes her home as his
wife, with no one apparently asking about her origins. Life seems happily
settled, until Ujitada, missing the empress dowager, looks in the mirror she
gave him; this allows him to see her as she goes about her business in China
and, while they cannot communicate, her unique perfume does come
through the mirror and scent Ujitada’s clothes. When he returns home,
Princess Hua-yang smells the perfume on his clothes and concludes that he
is seeing another woman.
At this point, the text has: “The manuscript states: ‘Here, too, the binding
is damaged and the remaining pages have been lost.’” This is followed by four
fictive colophons, one of which claims that the copying of the text was
completed on the eighteenth day of the fourth month of Jōgan 3 (861).
Matsura is, then, the first true giko monogatari, that is, “pseudo-classical
romance.” It seems not, however, to have been a complete success. The
Utsuho and especially Man’yōshū sub-texts peter out toward the end of Book
One. Teika himself was obviously aware of this, as the first fictional colophon
states in part: “This tale is about events that took place long ago, and indeed,
both the poetry and the language are pleasantly old-fashioned. Beginning

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with the flight to Mount Shu, however, the text appears to have been revised
by some clever fellow of our own age and contains many unsightly passages”
(Lammers, 162). The recourse to “lost” pages at the end indicates that the
story was abandoned rather than concluded. The image of a mysterious
woman, met on a hazy, moonlit spring night, remembered in tears, is central
to the young Teika’s poetic concept of yōen, or “ethereal beauty,” and it has
been suggested that in Matsura he is trying to apply yōen to an extended
narrative. Here, too, however, he falls somewhat short, one of the reasons
being that until the very end of the tale there is little overlap or conflict
between Ujitada’s three objects of desire: he spends no time thinking about
Princess Kannabi while he is in China, and more or less forgets about the
empress dowager once he is back with Princess Hua-yang in Japan. As the
Mumyōzōshi ladies complain: “Contemporary tales are all set in the time of
the emperors of old . . . They give the impression of having been written
hastily, and they also possess many unrealistic and exaggerated features”
(Marra 1984, 418).

Ariake no wakare (Partings at Dawn)

More successful, at least for modern readers, is Ariake no wakare. It is
mentioned very briefly in Mumyōzōshi and must have been written before
1201, again probably in the 1190s. The action of Book One centers on a
character reminiscent of Torikaebaya, but with important differences.
Sadaijin and his wife have long been without a son and worry about the
continuance of their family line. After various prayers are offered, his wife
gives birth – but to a girl. The parents, however, raise the child as a boy, and
“he” has a successful career at court much along the lines of the Torikaebaya
protagonist. In his sixteenth year he is promoted to the position of udaishō
(major captain of the right). Udaishō has a unique ability that allows him to
make himself invisible. With this, he secretly visits the houses of others,
spying on their activities. Through these nocturnal investigations, Udaishō
discovers that “his” uncle, Sadaishō, is sexually abusing his own stepdaughter.
Udaishō also spies on Sadaishō’s son, Sanmi no Chūjō, who, as if manifesting
an inherited trait, is having an affair with the young wife of the aged Prince
Nakatsukasa. The stepdaughter, Tai no Ue, soon finds herself pregnant, and
the invisible Udaishō spirits her away to the safety of his home. Here she
bears a son, whom Udaishō publicly recognizes as his son, thus putting an
end to his family’s concerns about an heir.

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At a banquet, Udaishō’s flute-playing causes lightning and thunder and the

appearance of a heavenly scent. Tai no Ue is, as in earlier tales, happy in her
sexless marriage with Udaishō. The latter disappears from home for about a
week every month (due to menstruation) and during one absence Tai no Ue
becomes the victim of Sanji no Chūjō. This results in another pregnancy, but,
unlike Chūnagon in Torikaebaya, Udaishō feels no alienation from her.
One night the emperor molests Udaishō, discovering her true sex, leading
her family to soon announce her “death” and the presentation of a “sister” to
the emperor. Tai no Ue bears a daughter and takes religious vows, while the
former Udaishō, now junior imperial consort, soon conceives, and gives birth
to a boy who is named crown prince, elevating her to the position of empress.
While, unlike the children in Torikaebaya, Udaishō did not undertake a
gender-reversal due to her own, innate, inclinations, after aligning her gender
with her sex she often experiences what Robert Khan has called “gender
nostalgia,” missing the days when she had more freedom of movement and
could participate in male-coded activities, such as writing Chinese poetry and
playing the flute.
Books Two and Three, like the latter half of Genji, focus on “Udaishō’s
children,” that is, the girl and especially the boy fathered on Tai no Ue by
Sanmi no Chūjō and Sadaishō, respectively. The differing fate of these two
men is somewhat puzzling: Sanmi no Chūjō suffers the full chastisement of
the irogonomi – not only does he continue to mourn the loss of Tai no Ue,
but while his daughter eventually rises to empress she is only made aware of
her true parentage shortly before his death, so he gets none of the benefits of
her position. Sadaishō, on the other hand, despite raping his stepdaughter, is
eventually made master (daibu) of his illegitimate granddaughter’s court and
regent, all without ever knowing her true parentage.
Ironically, “Udaishō’s son” is named the new Sanmi no Chūjō, and his
sexual appetite matches that of his father, Sadaijin; in fact, like his half-brother
(the first Sanmi no Chūjō), he sleeps with Prince Nakatsukasa’s wife – a
woman old enough to be his mother. Eventually he finds himself married to
two women: Ōigimi, the eldest daughter of Saemon no Suke; and Shijō no
Ue, one of his half-brother’s acknowledged children.
As in Torikaebaya, both women become pregnant, but in Ariake each is
tormented by a mono no ke (evil spirit), who turns out to be Prince
Nakatsukasa’s wife. Unlike Lady Rokujō in Genji, Prince Nakatsukasa’s wife
actively hates her rivals and hopes for their deaths. Instead, it is she who dies,
relieving the women of their affliction.

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The new Sanmi no Chūjō remembers little of his “father,” Udaishō, but
finds himself romantically drawn to the former empress, taking the pseudo-
incest motif of Genji and Fujitsubo and making it literal. The incest motif is
also played out through the new Sanmi no Chūjō’s infatuation with the
consort of the crown prince who is, unbeknown to him, actually his half-
sister. The crown prince, for his part, bears a striking resemblance to the
former Udaishō (in fact, his grandmother), and when he plays Udaishō’s flute
on the occasion of the former emperor’s fortieth birthday, heavenly maidens
descend and dance above the gathering. One of the maidens begs the former
empress to come to heaven with them – presumably her true home – but she
declines. The tale ends with Jijū, the lady-in-waiting who served both Tai no
Ue and the former empress, on her death-bed and about to reveal to Sanmi
no Chūjō who his real father was.
Stylistically, Ariake can be considered a giko monogatari (pseudo-classical
tale) in the sense that its language is very close to that of Genji, avoiding some
of the changes Japanese underwent in the Kamakura period, such as an
excessive use of honorifics. It also seems to provide a more unified narrator,
in the person of Jijū, making the text somewhat nikki-like. In terms of plot, as
Khan has written, “Few preceding texts other than Genji provide such a
summa of the main themes and motifs of the court tale type of monogatari”
(1998, 32).

Fūyō wakashū
Critical consideration of the monogatari genre reached its second peak in 1271
with the completion of the Fūyō wakashū (Collection of Wind-Tossed
Leaves), an imperial anthology-like collection of over two hundred poems
drawn exclusively from monogatari, in twenty books (only eighteen are
extant). Again, this event shows interestingly gendered aspects. The collec-
tion was commissioned by the consort of retired emperor GoSaga (1220–72,
r. 1242–6), Ōmiya In Saionji Kisshi, using books in her collection. The ladies in
Mumyōzōshi had complained that a woman had never been called upon to
edit an imperial anthology (chokusenshū), and poems from monogatari were
never included in such anthologies. The Fūyōshū, then, marks the increased
esteem of this narrative genre strongly associated with women. On the other
hand, the editor of the anthology is thought not to have been a women, but
rather Fujiwara no Tameie (1198–1275), Teika’s son.
The collection provides evidence that it was in fact in the Kamakura period
that most monogatari were produced. As Khan has written, “Whereas the
Mumyōzōshi deals with twenty-nine monogatari, of which ten are extant, the

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1420 waka in the extant eighteen books of Fūyōwakashū are culled from no
fewer than 198 monogatari, and the complete text probably contained 1563
waka from 220 monogatari” (1998, 10). Konishi Jin’ichi argues that the
increased production is likely due to increased readership, and quotes a
passage from Waga mi ni tadoru himegimi in which a government minister is
praised not only for having memorized the entire contents of the first three
imperial anthologies, but also “all the monogatari that were ever written”
(285). In other words, men now too were consumers of fiction.
Of the 198 monogatari listed in the Fūyōshū, only twenty-three are extant:
all of those discussed above and fourteen others. Of the last group, none has
been translated into a Western language, and several of them have had no
critical edition in Japanese.

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Premodern commentary on the classical
literary canon
lewis cook

The three most frequently and exhaustively commented texts of the classical
literary canon are Kokin wakashū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems,
hereafter KKS), Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise), and Genji monogatari (The Tale
of Genji). The “Kana Preface” to KKS in particular received more intensive
exegetical attention, per word, than any other secular text in Japan. Apart from
the fact that KKS was the first waka anthology compiled by imperial commis-
sion, such exceptional attention was likely encouraged by a tradition that the
Kana Preface, the founding statement of waka poetics, was in part analogous
and allusively indebted to the Mao Preface (aka Great Preface) to the Shijing,
the first relatively systematic statement, among those that survive, of Chinese
classical poetics. By freely adapting the typology of poetic rhetoric from the
Mao Preface, Tsurayuki was tacitly exploiting the prestige of the Shijing as the
first and only properly “literary” text in the court-sponsored Western Han
canon, and in turn drawing on the exemplary status of the Mao Preface as the
earliest extant commentary on a poetic monument in the sphere of literary
Chinese.
It is noteworthy that both The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji were widely
received by early generations of literati readers as resources for the study of
waka. Thus the earliest commentaries on Genji, Koreyuki’s Genji shaku and
Teika’s Okuiri, were largely concerned with identifying poetic allusions and
their sources. The prestige of courtly waka as the defining genre of “high
literature” in the Heian capital from the end of the ninth century became an
impetus to the canonization of Ise and Genji and a rationale for scholastic
commentary on works which, albeit acknowledged as fictionalized autobio-
graphy in the case of Ise and more or less unalloyed fiction in that of Genji,
could also be seen as beneficiaries of the analogy of KKS to the Shijing as a
properly literary text that was hospitable, within the Han canon, to scholarly
commentary.

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The webs of intertextuality binding these three texts are another factor in
their being singled out as objects of scholarly commentary. By contrast, for
example, imperial waka anthologies for the three centuries after KKS were
largely ignored by commentators until the eighteenth century; the same is
true for The Tale of Sagoromo, a narrative fiction the waka of which were
widely considered comparable to those of Genji in late Heian and Kamakura
times. And there is virtually no tradition of early or medieval commentary on
any collection of poem-tales that might have been compared to Ise. By
contrast, the 1989 Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei edition of KKS identifies
196 distinct works consisting in part or whole of commentary on it from the
late Heian through the end of the Edo periods. On a rough count, extant pre-
Meiji commentaries on The Tales of Ise number over a hundred titles. For The
Tale of Genji quantification is more difficult given the variety of texts which
may be considered partially exegetical, yet it is clear that a disproportionate
volume of commentary on each of these three works was produced over the
centuries from the late Heian through the late Edo periods. The waka
impetus noted above does not fully answer the inevitable question of why
these three texts among many others of an ostensibly literary character
should have occasioned such intensive exegetical labors, an activity more
often associated by modern conventional wisdom with scholarly texts of
Confucian and Buddhist traditions.
One factor must be that KKS and Tales of Ise themselves incorporate
distinctive forms of commentary. KKS can be defined in fact as a corpus of
cited poems framed by two kinds of editorial comments and two “prefaces.”
(1) The superscriptions or head-notes (kotogaki, kotobagaki), literally words in
prose (as opposed to the language of the poems), that include the specifica-
tion of generic topics, statements of the occasion of a given poem, or a
concise narrative account of the circumstances under which the poem was
composed. To this category might be added the titles assigned to each of the
twenty books making up the collection. These were in accord with well-
established conventions in Chinese poetics, in the eighth-century collection
Man’yōshū, and in the set topics of poetry matches and other formal or
informal social occasions, and they were carefully emplaced by the compilers
to generate structures of variety, temporal seriation, and perspective that
give the anthology a remarkable degree of integrity. (2) Opposite to these are
footnotes (sachū, literally “notes inscribed to the left” of the poem) which
provide speculative commentary in the form of legends on the authorship of
certain poems. In addition to these must be counted the apparatus of the
“prefaces” which offer contextual accounts of the circumstances under which

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the anthology was compiled, a brief history of the development of waka, an

illustrated typology of its rhetorical forms, aesthetic or critical comments on
the style of exemplary poets, and in the Kana Preface the so-called “old” or
“minuscule” notes, interlinear comments often critical of the text proper.
These last are of interest because there is no evidence for deciding whether
they are editorial comments added after publication, or ironic editorial
commentary by Ki no Tsurayuki, presumed author of the Kana Preface.
Similar questions are posed in The Tales of Ise by the frequent appearance of
editorial comments, many of them critical of the episodes to which they are
appended, others purporting to offer retrospective historical correctives by
witnesses to or informants on the events narrated. Others still are evaluative
of the poems or characters in various episodes and a few of them address the
reader with seemingly ironic or skeptical questions about specific poems or
the comportment of the hero or other characters. Although such comments
may well have been added by editors or commentators during the centuries
in which the work was being remolded toward the more or less definitive
version of the Teika recension, there is no basis for deciding whether they are
to be taken literally or ironically, or belong inside or outside of the text
proper, and there is no tenable distinction between such comments and the
interlinear format that commentary on canonical texts often took.
Although it is categorically different from the above forms of comments
interpolated by compilers or possibly by editors, Genji is permeated by a
mode of fictional commentary, undoubtedly the work of the historical author
but taking the form of an implied author who interrupts the telling of the
story to comment on events of the story or its recitation in the mode of direct
address to the reader, a technique similar to an aside or soliloquy in drama.
Striking examples are the opening words of the second chapter or the
concluding passage of chapter 4. These are functionally equivalent to those
editorial or quasi-editorial comments in The Tales of Ise that serve as marks of
ironic or self-reflexive narration. This technique was singled out by fifteenth-
century commentators on Genji who created the term sōshiji (or sōshi no ji,
literally, “the ground [as opposed to the pattern or design] of the book”) to
describe it.
If these are the primordial modes of premodern commentary on these
three texts, they can also be seen as precedents for the earliest mode of
scholastic exegesis, interlinear or marginal notations inscribed in a manu-
script of the text (a practice which continued at least through the nineteenth
century). This mode anticipated the next, consisting of shō, which literally
means a culling of passages from an antecedent work, in practice representing

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the result of aggregating interlinear comments into a separate work which

cites only enough of the text commented to specify the object of commen-
tary, in effect the reverse of a manuscript with interlinear comments, differ-
ent only in the proportion of canonical text to commentary. The word shō is
often translated as “book,” but a crucial distinction is lost. The manuscript of
a canonical text itself was usually referred to as hon (the word for “book” in
modern usage, but originally meaning a root, origin, or foundation), and shō
became a generic term, in medieval usage, for a commentary in the sense of
an aggregate of citations of a book with interposed comments.
Traditions of commentary on this tripartite canon were closely interre-
lated and typically transmitted through competing family or school lineages.
The earliest commentaries on KKS were glossographical and philological,
eventually fostering an emphasis on esoteric oral traditions regarding the
referents and pronunciation of words which had become obscure by the
twelfth century and after. Such esoteric traditions culminated in closely
guarded but largely spurious secrets such as the identities of the “Three
Birds” and the “Three Trees,” but there were also resilient traditions based on
scholarly exegesis rather than esoterica, notably those of Ichijō Kanera, Tō no
Tsuneyori, Sōgi, and others in the fifteenth century, who did not take the
secret teachings seriously except as a lucrative form of pedagogical currency.
The earliest extant commentaries on The Tales of Ise inclined toward
extravagant allegoresis incorporating strains of Esoteric and Tantric
Buddhism and Shintō that flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies, often intertwined with heterodox KKS commentaries of a similar bent.
These were in striking contrast with traditions of medieval commentary on
Genji, which were notably less secretive, and with marginal and perfunctory
exceptions tended to abstain from esoterism and allegoresis. There were
indeed secret teachings on various mysteries in the interpretation of obscure
words or phrases in Genji, but they never attained the prestige of those on
KKS or Ise. The most plausible explanation for this is that, while there are
varying but numerous obscurities and lacunae in the language, manuscript
traditions and historical contexts of KKS and Ise, the fictional world of Genji is
altogether too cohesive to be susceptible to sustained allegorization or
esoteric interpretation. In the words of Hosokawa Yūsai, a seventeenth-
century scholar and exegete, The Tale of Genji took fiction and turned it
into fact, while The Tales of Ise took facts and turned them into fiction.
Presumably this contrast does not apply well to KKS insofar as poetry is
neither fact nor fiction.

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The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
haruo shirane

Sei Shōnagon (d. early eleventh century) was the daughter of Kiyohara
Motosuke, a noted waka poet and one of the editors of the Gosenshū
(Collection of Later Gleanings), the second imperial waka anthology. (The
Sei in Sei Shōnagon’s name comes from the Sino-Japanese reading for the Kiyo
in Kiyohara.) Around 981, Sei Shōnagon married Tachibana no Norimitsu, the
first son of the noted Tachibana family, but they separated after she bore him a
child the next year. In 990 Fujiwara Kaneie, the husband of the author of the
Kagerō Diary, stepped down from his position as regent (kanpaku) and gave it to
his son Fujiwara Michitaka, referred to as middle regent (naka no kanpaku).
Michitaka married his daughter Teishi to Emperor Ichijō (r. 986–1011) in 990,
and she soon became a high consort (nyōgo) and then empress (chūgū). Sei
Shōnagon became a lady-in-waiting to Teishi in 993, the year that Michitaka
became prime minister (daijō daijin). In 994, Korechika, Michitaka’s eldest son
and the apparent heir to the regency, became palace minister (naidaijin). In 995
Michitaka died in an epidemic, and in the following year Korechika was exiled
in a move engineered by Michitaka’s younger brother and rival Michinaga,
after which Teishi was forced to leave the imperial palace. Sei Shōnagon
continued to serve her until Teishi’s death in childbirth in 1000. In the mean-
time, in 999, Shōshi, Michinaga’s daughter and Murasaki Shikibu’s mistress,
became the chief consort to Emperor Ichijō, marking Michinaga’s ascent to the
pinnacle of power.
The Pillow Book, which was finished around 1005, after the demise of
Teishi’s salon, focuses on the years 993 and 994, when the Michitaka family
and Teishi were at the height of their glory, leaving unmentioned the
subsequent political tragedy. Almost all the major works by women of this
time were written by women in Empress Shōshi’s salon: Murasaki Shikibu,
Izumi Shikibu, and Akazome Emon. Only Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book repre-
sents the rival salon of Empress Teishi. Like many of the other diaries by
court women, the Pillow Book can be seen as a memorial to the author’s

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patron, specifically a homage to the Naka no Kanpaku family and a literary

prayer to the spirit of the deceased empress Teishi. One of the few indirect
references to the sad circumstances that befell Teishi’s family is “The Cat
Who Lived in the Palace,” about the cruel punishment, sudden exile, and
ignominious return of the dog Okinamaro, who, like Korechika, secretly
returned to the capital and later was pardoned.
With roughly three hundred discrete prose sections, the Pillow Book defies
genre definition. In the modern period, it was treated as an exemplar of the
zuihitsu (meanderings of the brush) or miscellany genre, centered on personal
observations and musings. Using this guideline, modern literary histories
treat the Pillow Book as the generic predecessor of Hōjōki (Account of My Ten-
Foot-Square Hut, 1212) and Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1331?).
The roughly three hundred discrete sections of the Pillow Book can be
divided into three different types – list, essay, and diary – which sometimes
overlap. The lists consist of noun sections (mono wa), which describe parti-
cular categories of things like “Flowering Trees,” “Birds,” “Insects,” and tend
to focus on nature or poetic topics; and adjectival sections (monozukushi),
which contain interesting lists associated with a particular state, such as
“Depressing Things,” cited below, and are often humorous and witty (parti-
cularly in the case of derogatory adjectives).

Depressing Things
A dog howling in the daytime. A wickerwork fishnet in spring. A red plum-
blossom dress in the Third or Fourth Months. A lying-in room when the
baby has died. A cold, empty brazier. An ox driver who hates his oxen. A
scholar whose wife has one girl child after another.

The wickerwork fishnet (at least in classical poetry) was a sign of autumn but
is incongruously combined here with spring, creating aesthetic dissonance,
and the red plum-blossom dress should be worn at the beginning of spring (in
the First Month) instead of, as found here, in the late spring (Third Month) or
early summer (Fourth Month). What depresses the author, in other words,
are things that are out of sync with seasonal associations, or with the phase of
the season, which Heian aristocrats, particularly those at court, were highly
attuned to and had a deep aesthetic awareness of, as made evident in the
famous opening section of the work.

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the
hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red, and wisps of purplish cloud trail over
them.

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 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines but on dark nights,
too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is!
In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of
the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos;
more charming still is a file of wild geese, like specks in the distant sky. When
the sun has set, one’s heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of
the insects.
In winter the early mornings . . .

Here Sei Shōnagon takes a classical poetic association (such as autumn and
evening) and then expands it in unorthodox ways; in autumn, she incorpo-
rates the silhouette of crows, which were not a standard waka topic.
The diary sections, such as “The Sliding Screen in the Back of the Hall,”
describe specific events and figures in history, particularly those related to
Empress Teishi and her immediate family. The essay sections may focus on a
specific season or month, but, unlike the diary sections, they sometimes bear
no historical dates. The textual variants of the Pillow Book arrange these three
section types differently. The Maeda and Sakai variants separate them into
three large groups. By contrast, the Nōin variant and the Sankan variant,
which has become the canonical version, mix the different types of sections.
The end result is that the Pillow Book, at least in the Sankan version, appears
ahistorical; events are not presented in chronological order but instead move
back and forth in time, with no particular development or climax, creating a
sense of a world suspended in time, a mode perhaps suitable for a paean to
Teishi’s heyday.
Another category, which overlaps with the others and resembles anecdotal
literature, is the “stories heard” (kikigaki), that is, stories heard from one’s
master or mistress, which provided knowledge and models of cultivation.
Indeed, much of the Pillow Book is about aristocratic women’s education,
especially the need for aesthetic awareness as well as erudition, allusiveness,
and extreme refinement in communication. Sei Shōnagon shows a particular
concern for delicacy and harmony, for the proper combination of object,
sense, and circumstance, usually a fusion of human and natural worlds.
Incongruity and disharmony, by contrast, become the butt of humor and
of Sei Shōnagon’s sharp wit. The Pillow Book is often read as a personal record
of accomplishments, with a number of the sections about incidents that
display the author’s talent. Indeed, much of the interest of Pillow Book has
been in the strong character and personality of Sei Shōnagon.
The Pillow Book is noted for its distinctive prose style: its rhythmic, quick-
moving, compressed, and varied sentences, often set up in alternating

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couplets. Although the typical Japanese sentence ends with the predicate, the
phrases and sentences in the Pillow Book often end with nouns or eliminate
the exclamatory and connective particles so characteristic of Heian women’s
literature. The compact, forceful, bright, witty style stands in contrast to the
gentle, elongated style found in The Tale of Genji and other works by Heian
women. Indeed, the adjectival sections in particular have a haikai-esque
(comic linked verse) quality, marked by witty, unexpected juxtaposition.
The Pillow Book is now considered one of the pillars of Heian vernacular
court literature, but unlike the Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji,
which had been canonized by the thirteen century, the Pillow Book was not a
required text for waka poets (perhaps because it contained relatively little
poetry) and was relatively neglected in the Heian and medieval periods. But it
became popular with the new commoner audience in the Tokugawa (Edo)
period, and ever since, it has been widely read for its style, humor, and
interesting lists.

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 15
Heian literary diaries: from Tosa nikki to
Sarashina nikki
sonja arntzen

This chapter focuses on five major diaries of the Heian period, Tosa nikki
(Tosa Diary), Kagerō nikki (Kagerō Diary), Izumi shikibu nikki (Izumi Shikibu
Diary), Murasaki shikibu nikki (Murasaki Shikibu Diary), and Sarashina nikki
(Sarashina Diary). Together they form a remarkable body of autobiographi-
cal texts that is unparalleled at such an early date. A conscious effort at
aesthetic shaping for the eyes of others is apparent in all of them, which
results in a sophisticated literary quality. As a consequence, when the canon
of classical Japanese literature was established in the early twentieth century,
the diary form was designated as an important category. This is in marked
contrast to English literary history in which the diary is conceived of primar-
ily as the forerunner of journalism. These diaries curiously share “modern-
seeming” features such as a secular focus, acuity in psychological description,
and, most important of all, an awareness that telling the “story” of one’s life
inevitably entails a kind of fictionalization. The final unusual feature is the
strong presence of women writers. Four of the five major diaries were
authored by women, and the male progenitor of the genre Ki no Tsurayuki
(d. c. 945) assumed a female persona to write his diary.
The Japanese term for the genre, nikki (daily record or diary), originally
referred to the official and personal diaries of daily events kept in kanbun
(literary Chinese) by male court officials. Kanbun diaries were chronologi-
cally organized with dated entries and were generally confined to recording
facts. Diaries written in vernacular Japanese with kana (Japanese script), by
contrast, have a looser chronological organization, tend to focus on emo-
tional states occasioned by events rather than the events themselves, and
usually contain a large number of waka poems. In fact, a more direct
precursor for the kana diary than the kanbun diary is the shikashū (personal
waka poetry collection). Since the composition of waka had become an
important social skill for courtiers from at least the ninth century on, most
aristocrats kept a collection of their own compositions. These collections

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often had extended headnotes recording the circumstances of composition

and the social interactions that occasioned the exchanging of poems. This
often resulted in a kind of personal diary. The Ise-shū (Collected Poems of
Lady Ise) is sometimes regarded as the first kana diary. The consensus of
recent scholarship on that text, however, asserts the Ise-shū to be a fictiona-
lized account of the life of Lady Ise (c. 877–c. 940) done significantly after her
death on the basis of her collected poems.
This notion of a “fictionalized” biography brings up the other literary
genre of the Heian period with which the diary developed in dialogue, the
monogatari (vernacular tale). Some of the diaries of the Heian period were
known by alternate titles that designated them as monogatari rather than
nikki. The Takamitsu nikki (Takamitsu Diary, c. 962), alternatively known as
the Tōnomine Shōshō monogatari (The Tale of the Lesser Captain of
Tōnomine), is a case in point. Based on a historical event, the abrupt taking
of the tonsure by the twenty-three-old Takamitsu (c. 939–c. 985), a prominent
member of the most powerful branch of the Fujiwara family, the text consists
of a collection of poems and letters exchanged by Takamitsu, his wife, and
other family members. The prominence of exchanged letters in the account
means that Takamitsu’s own voice is only one among many voices, which is
perhaps why the text came to be known as a “tale” as well as a diary. This
multivoiced character is apparent in all diary texts. Nonetheless the five
major diaries analyzed below present a more unified point of view than is
found in the Takamitsu Diary.

Tosa Diary (c. 935)

The Tosa Diary chronicles a fifty-five-day journey taken by the author Ki no
Tsurayuki, his family and entourage back to the capital in 934 after his period
of service as provincial governor in Tosa province. Although his official
career was not distinguished, Ki no Tsurayuki had the distinction of being
one of the compilers of the Kokinshū (c. 905–14), and he composed the
Japanese preface to that anthology, which was the first attempt to write
discursively in vernacular Japanese. At the comparatively advanced age of
sixty-six, he added to this list of “firsts” by composing the first diary in the
vernacular language.
The journey itself provides a unity to the text. All the entries are dated,
making this diary the closest to the usual conception of a diary in the Western
or Chinese context. The conscientious use of dates betrays the writing habits
of the male author who is used to keeping daily records in Chinese. The

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account is balanced between expressions of wonder at the beauty of the

scenery through which the party travels and depiction of the difficulties and
dangers of the journey.
Nearly all the episodes have poems as their focal point. A strong modern
current of interpretation regarding the Tosa Diary is that Ki no Tsurayuki’s
purpose in writing this text was to put forth his mature view on the essence of
Japanese poetry. The poems in the diary are attributed to various members of
the party, including a young girl, an old woman, the “leader” of the group
(presumably Tsurayuki), and the mother of a child who had died. Many of
the poems are ascribed vaguely to “someone in the party.” Nonetheless it is
generally assumed that Tsurayuki authored all of the poems.
In addition to the journey and poetry, a third strand unifying the Tosa Diary
is the theme of grief for a lost child. Throughout the text, poems by the
grieving mother and others recall the young girl who had accompanied the
family to Tosa but died there. The general assumption is that the child was
Tsurayuki’s and that another purpose of the diary was to eulogize his and the
family’s loss.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Tosa Diary is the author’s choice
of a female narrator. The first sentence introduces her: “I wrote this wonder-
ing what it would be like for a woman to try her hand at one of those diaries
that men are said to keep” (Heldt trans., 204). The “diaries that men are said
to keep” refers to kanbun diaries, and the simplest explanation for the choice
of a woman narrator is that it allowed Tsurayuki to write in Japanese. The
text has always been read as Tsurayuki’s own and the woman narrator is not
given a distinct personality. She is an “I” that enables the author to describe
himself from the outside, yet often narrator and author are indistinguishable.
This is made possible by the particular nature of Japanese grammar, in which
subjects are not required for every verb, and pronouns even when they are
used are not as expressive of personal identity and agency as they are in
English. Accordingly a narrative voice can easily slide in and out of various
positions in classical Japanese prose. While this is difficult to convey in
English translation, consider the following example from the latter part of
the diary:
Several of my fellow travelers were accompanied by children they had not
had when they went down this same river, children born during their stay in
the province of Tosa. Whenever the boat stopped, they would carry their
children with them as they went ashore. Seeing this, the mother whose child
had died was unable to contain her grief and sobbed as she composed this:

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nakarashi mo Those who had none

aritsutsu kaeru now return with theirs:
hito no ko o other’s children
arishi mo nakute bring sorrow to one who
kuru ga kanashisa has lost her own.
What must the father have felt as he heard this? (Held trans., 211)

The narrator describes the scene and then evokes the first-person perspective
of the mother with the citation of the poem, whereupon the narrator asks
readers to imagine the father’s feelings, but at least in the original we also
hear Tsurayuki himself saying, “Please imagine my grief as the father.” This is
particularly true because what immediately follows in the text is a comment
on the poetics of emotional expression in China and Japan that can only be
understood as in Tsurayuki’s own voice.
In the Tosa Diary, then, we have a partially fictionalized account of a life
experience that has always been received as authentic personal expression.
The diary is not referenced directly in the other diaries by women authors
that followed in the succeeding generation, but it is assumed that knowledge
of it, even if only as a precedent for composing diaries in the vernacular
language, did inspire them.

Kagerō Diary (c. 974)

The Kagerō Diary covers the years 954 to 974 in the life of Fujiwara
Michitsuna’s Mother (935?–94?). She was a member of a mid-ranking branch
of the Fujiwara family, and became the second wife of Fujiwara Kaneie
(929–90), scion of the most powerful branch of that large extended clan.
The text focuses on the author’s relationship with her husband. Her marriage
was begun, sustained, and several times saved by the exchange of poetry.
Therefore, poetry exchanges between wife and husband form the core of the
work. The prose contexts for the poems as well as the poems themselves
chronicle the author’s shifting state of mind. The result is an intimate
psychological portrait of a woman troubled by insecurity and dissatisfaction
but achieving at the end of her marriage, and of the book, some measure of
calm and emotional independence.
The opening of the Kagerō Diary gives a well-wrought declaration of her
purpose for writing. She begins by speaking of herself in the third person,
“Thus the time has passed and there is one in the world who has lived such a
vain existence” (Arntzen trans., 57). She goes on to castigate the “old tales” for

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their romantic fantasies, coming to the realization that “if she were to make a
record of a life like her own, being really nobody, it might actually be novel,
and could serve to answer, should anyone ask, what is it like, the life of a
woman married to a highly placed man” (ibid.). She ends her prologue with a
caveat about the unreliability of memory, which excuses her from any
inaccuracy in advance. Although, as with the Tosa Diary, it seems that the
author finds it more comfortable to begin speaking about herself from the
outside, she immediately drops the third-person narration and the rest of
the diary is quite firmly in the first person, almost obsessively so for the taste
of at least one prominent Japanese scholar, who saw self-absorption
embedded in her writing style.1 In her narration, she not only describes her
actions and emotions but also gives verbatim renderings of her internal
thoughts, a technique that was later exploited to excellent effect by
Murasaki Shikibu in The Tale of Genji. The following example is from early
in the work when she and her husband have just managed to overcome an
estrangement. They have slept together but still feel on edge as they gaze out
together at the autumn flowers. They exchange poems in which he accuses
her of feeling cold toward him and she retorts by complaining of his neglect:

Saying such things, it was painful between us as always.

As the late rising moon was just about to emerge from behind the mountain
ridge, he makes as though to depart. Then, perhaps seeing the expression on
my face as I think surely, tonight at least he doesn’t have to go, he says, “Well, if
you really think I ought to stay . . .?” But I didn’t feel that desperate, so I say:
ikaga semu What is there to do?
yama no ha ni dani Since your heart is like the moon
todomarade that does not linger
kokoro mo sora ni at the edge of the mountain
idemu tsuki o ba but would emerge into the sky.
He replies:
hisakata no You say this heart-moon
sora ni kokoro no emerges into the o’er-spread sky,
izu to ieba yet it will leave
kage wa soko ni mo its reflection
tomarubeki kana behind in this pond.
and so he stayed. (Arntzen trans., 85)

1
See Watanabe Minoru, Heianchō bunshōshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1981) 90–
112, and “Style and Point of View in Kagerō nikki,” trans. Richard Bowring. Journal of
Japanese Studies 10, no. 2 (1984).

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The immediacy of the Kagerō Diary’s narration style is also demonstrated in

the translation above. A retrospective view exemplified by the opening of the
diary alternates with one which approaches a historical present, especially in
the entries centered on poem exchanges.
A significant portion of the diary is given over to accounts of the author’s
pilgrimages. The travel passages in the Kagerō Diary are often overlooked
because of the intensity of the story around the marriage, but they have an
interest of their own because of the liberating effect travel appears to have on
the author’s consciousness. Her relationship with her only son is also given
considerable attention in the text and that relationship takes on an intrigu-
ingly ironic aspect when he reaches maturity and she ends up composing love
poems for him to use in his own courtship adventures. The Kagerō Diary is the
only woman’s diary from the Heian period that gives the perspective of a
woman who spent her entire life “within the home.” The authors of the next
three diaries all experienced service at court.

Izumi Shikibu Diary (c. 1008)

The Izumi Shikibu Diary gives an account of ten months in a love affair
between Izumi Shikibu (fl. c. 1000) and Prince Atsumichi (981–1007). Izumi
Shikibu had already been involved with Atsumichi’s elder brother who had
died in 1002. Both affairs were noted as scandals in contemporary histories.
The first affair resulted in Izumi Shikibu’s divorce from her first husband and
disownment by her father. The diary records that, in the year following the
elder brother’s death, Atsumichi and Izumi Shikibu were initially brought
together due to their shared grief. At the end of the diary, the prince installs
Izumi Shikibu in his household, ostensibly as a personal servant but more like
a secret wife, at which the prince’s official consort takes offense and returns to
her family home. The diary ends with this somewhat uncomfortable but
“happy” ending. The course of the relationship in real life came to a sad
ending when the prince died four years later, leaving Izumi Shikibu alone,
still estranged from her family, and the butt of gossip. Nonetheless, the next
year in 1008, she was invited by the most powerful of all the Fujiwara regents,
Fujiwara Michinaga, to serve as a lady-in-waiting in the entourage of his
daughter Shōshi, which had already grown into an important literary salon
with members such as Murasaki Shikibu and Akazome Emon.
Of the five diaries discussed here, the Izumi Shikibu Diary is most like a
work of fiction. A passionate love affair develops between a man and a
woman who are separated by social standing yet drawn irresistibly to one

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another. She distrusts his reliability; he doubts her fidelity, and only after a
series of contretemps do they end up firmly together. The account is narrated
as securely in the third person as classical Japanese grammar allows, with the
main female protagonist referred to as “the woman” throughout. Moreover,
the diary contains verbatim records of communications that Izumi Shikibu
could not have witnessed herself, such as a scolding delivered to the prince at
home by his old nurse, or, at the end of the text, an exchange of letters
between the prince’s official consort and her relatives. In fact, the text of the
diary ends with a scribe’s note to the effect that the letter of the consort and
the words of her ladies-in-waiting “appear to have been invented” (kakinashi
nameri). Certainly, this mode of narration is more like a tale than a diary.
Only one manuscript line gives the title as nikki, the rest call it a mono-
gatari. Some modern scholars maintain that, like the Ise nikki, it must be a
fictionalized biography. Nonetheless, the current consensus is that Izumi
Shikibu’s authorship of the text should be sustained, and since the Meiji
period the preference has been to call it a diary. Despite the fictional aspects
of the text, its overall feeling is as intimate and personal as a first-person
narration. Since all the long passages of introspection are by the woman, her
consciousness dominates the narrative.
Izumi Shikibu might have been invited into Shōshi’s court to write up an
account of her love affair with the prince that would serve to eulogize him
and provide the “inside” story for one of the most talked-about affairs of the
generation. Prince Atsumichi was part of Michinaga’s protected circle of
imperial family members and Michinaga might have wished to exercise
some control over how the prince was remembered. Joshua Mostow has
advanced the thesis that Heian women’s diaries performed a political purpose
by raising the cultural profile of the Fujiwara regents, displaying them as
skilled poets and amorous men. A corollary of his thesis is that the women
authors found ways to authentically represent themselves in the interstices of
the public purpose of their compositions (At the House of Gathered Leaves,
1–38). If a scenario similar to this might be true of Izumi Shikibu, then one can
imagine the difficulty of the task, and how vulnerable she was to becoming a
figure of derision. Writing in the third person was at least one way to distance
herself from her own story.
The exchange of poetry between Izumi Shikibu and the prince is more
central to this text than even that between husband and wife in the Kagerō
Diary. Through her poems, we are drawn into the intensity of her passion.
The poems are moments that stop the action in the text and draw readers
into empathy with the poet. Although this is generally true of the role of

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poetry in all Heian diaries, this phenomenon is especially powerful in the

Izumi Shikibu Diary. The overarching message of this text could be summar-
ized as follows, “I may not have loved wisely, but oh, how I loved and was
loved. Let this poetry stand as my testament.”

Murasaki Shikibu Diary (c. 1010)

Murasaki Shikibu (d. c. 1014) is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji.
Given the influence that colossus of creative achievement had on the entire
course of Japanese literature, enduring interest in her diary is no surprise. Her
composition of The Tale of Genji is assumed to have prompted her invitation
to join Shōshi’s court. The diary does contain precious information on the
early circulation of The Tale of Genji, but it begins as a sort of official journal
recording the politically significant birth of a male child to Shōshi. There is
speculation that Michinaga commissioned Murasaki Shikibu to produce a
vernacular record of his daughter’s court somewhat in the style of a Chinese
diary. Nonetheless, the narrative quickly moves to a more autobiographical
mode in which the narrator muses on the kind of person she has become and
the disjunction she feels between how others view her and how she views
herself. Famous among these passages is one that records her early education
in Chinese texts that was gained from observation of her father’s lessons to
her brother. She reports that she was so much swifter at this academic
learning than her brother that her father was moved to exclaim, “What a
pity she was not born a man” (Bowring trans., 139). Overall, the portrait she
constructs of herself is that of a sensitive intellectual woman who feels out of
step with her society and is always at pains to conceal the depth of her mind
and learning from others.
The diary is also known for its vivid “backstage” vignettes of court life. She
gives brief but penetrating assessments of court colleagues. The descriptions
of Sei Shōnagon and Izumi Shikibu in particular have been closely scrutinized
for the rare contemporary information they contain about those writers.
Poetry exchanges with other ladies-in-waiting offer insight regarding the
intimate friendships between working women at court.
The diary is a patchwork of different textual styles which include journal-
istic reportage, miscellaneous reflections, and written exchanges with others.
The longest retrospective account of her life is actually written as a letter
addressed to an unspecified person. Some suggest it was meant for her only
daughter because it is interspersed with advice as to how to behave in society.
Of all the Heian diaries, the Murasaki Shikibu Diary feels the least finished. It is

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as though she never had time to go back and shape the text into an aesthetic
whole, yet every passage has an interest of its own and all provide insight into
this woman who has come to be regarded as the greatest writer of her time.

Sarashina Diary (c. 1060)

The Sarashina Diary spans forty years in the life of Sugawara Takasue’s
Daughter (1008 –?). Her father was a direct descendant of the famous poet
and scholar Sugawara Michizane (845–903). At the age of ten, Takasue’s
Daughter accompanied her father to his posting as the deputy provincial
governor in the province of Kazusa in eastern Japan, and she returned when
she was thirteen. Her account of the two-month trip back to the capital
occupies about a fifth of the diary and provides a rare view of travel through
the fresh eyes of a child. The family suffered a number of setbacks during the
author’s adolescence and youth, including a fire that destroyed their resi-
dence, the death of the eldest daughter in childbirth, and a long period with
no new appointment for the father. After her father finally obtained and
completed a governorship of the province of Hitachi, Takasue’s Daughter
began service as a lady-in-waiting in the household of the infant Princess
Yūshi (1038–1105) and was married to a middle-ranking courtier, Tachibana
Toshimichi (1002–58), all in her thirty-second year. She managed to bear at
least two children to her husband and keep up sporadic court attendance
through her middle years, and also appears to have enjoyed economic
security. When her husband died suddenly in 1058 her fortunes changed for
the worse, and the last pages of the diary record the loneliness and sadness of
old age. Takasue’s Daughter barely mentions her family life in the diary;
rather it is her travels, her reading, her dreams, and her poetry that occupy
most of it.
Exhibiting a limpid clarity on the surface, the Sarashina Diary has a
complex structure. The narration begins with a skillful evocation of a child’s
point of view, which is reprised throughout the work, particularly in passages
that record travel and those centered around poems written in response to
natural phenomenon. The opening also introduces the major theme of the
diary, the author’s fascination with tale literature. She records how her first
Buddhist prayers were directed toward returning to the capital so that she
could get to read all the tales that existed. Standing at the apex of her desire
for fiction was The Tale of Genji, of which she had only been given partial oral
renditions by her stepmother and elder sister. Takasue’s Daughter lived one
generation after the completion of The Tale of Genji and her diary bears

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witness to the powerful effect a great work of fiction can have on the
consciousness of its readers. When at the age of fourteen she finally obtained
a complete copy of The Tale of Genji and closeted herself away to read it day
and night until she found she had naturally come to memorize portions of it,
she declared that reading made her happier than if she had had the “chance to
become Empress.” On the other hand, right after this, she records a dream in
which a monk tells her to memorize the Lotus Sutra. This introduces a
counter-theme into the diary of the dangers of an addiction to fiction. In
retrospective passages throughout the work, she admonishes herself for her
frivolous pursuit of fiction and poetry. On the one hand, she claims that she
ignored warnings, such as the ones delivered in dreams, but her careful
recording of these dreams and their placement in juxtaposition with her
excesses of infatuation show that she was keenly aware at an early age of a
conflict between an absorption in literature and the need for salvation.
On the surface of her work, Takasue’s Daughter displays only the simplis-
tic understanding of Buddhism that was typical of her time, in which
Buddhist practice was primarily regarded as a means to obtain good fortune
in this life. Yet, the superficial message, “I was unsuccessful in life because my
fascination with fiction and poetry distracted me from Buddhist practice,” is
undercut by most of the content, which bears witness to the consoling power
of literature. In much the same way, Takasue’s Daughter portrays herself as
only a naïve reader of The Tale of Genji, a smitten fan. Yet again, careful
attention to subtle allusions to The Tale of Genji embedded in the text reveal
the author to have been a very sophisticated reader. It is as though Takasue’s
Daughter took seriously Murasaki Shikibu’s advice for women to never
openly display their depth.
Intertextual allusions in the Sarashina Diary reveal that Takasue’s
Daughter had assiduously read not only the Murasaki Shikibu Diary but also
the Kagerō Diary and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. A picture emerges of a
society of women writers who were an engaged audience for each other’s
works. The complex construction of the Sarashina Diary presupposes an
audience capable of reading between the lines. For example, Takasue’s
Daughter makes no mention of her fiction writing in her diary, even though
she is credited by Fujiwara Teika, the Kamakura period redactor of her text,
with the authorship of four tales (two of which, the Hamamatsu Chūnagon
monogatari and Yoru no nezame, are partially extant); yet this was something of
which her contemporary readers would have been aware. The Sarashina
Diary is a multifaceted text that defies easy definition, but one of the ways it
can be summarized is as a portrait of the writer as reader.

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Later developments
This survey of diaries from the Heian period reveals a fluid genre that
encompasses texts that blend such Western categories as travel journal,
memoir, autobiography, and fictionalized autobiography. The great variety
among the texts themselves shows that nikki were not bound by confor-
mance to strict norms as in the case of waka poetry. In fact, the last of diaries
to be produced in the Heian period, the Sanuki no Suke nikki (Sanuki no Suke
Diary, c. 1109) opened up new ground again. Written by Fujiwara Nagako
(1079?–?), a personal attendant to Emperor Horikawa (1079–1107), it provides
an intimate portrait of Emperor Horikawa during his final illness. In fact, so
much is the diary focused on the emperor that it has been alternately known
as the Horikawa-in nikki (Emperor Horikawa Diary). Nonetheless, an equal
purpose of the diary is to memorialize Nagako’s own service at court and
portray her passionate devotion to her sovereign. The political, professional,
and personal are inextricably intertwined in this text. Moreover, poetry is no
longer central to the narrative. The Sanuki no Suke Diary presages diaries
written by women in the Kamakura period, which share similar
characteristics.
The major diaries of the Heian period were all reproduced in woodblock
editions during the Tokugawa period, making them available to a general
audience. As mentioned above, these diaries were given an important place
in the modern canon of Japanese literature. They were first hailed as early
forerunners of the “I-Novel,” a form of autobiographical fiction that domi-
nated Japanese literary production in the Meiji and Taisho periods. When the
“I-Novel” fell into disfavor after the Second World War, the diaries were
recuperated by critics who recast them as “the epitome of the national
tradition, prefiguring ‘true modernity’” (Suzuki, 73). The presence of so
many women among these early diary authors recommends their study to
anyone interested in questions of gender in literary production.

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 16
The Heian Academy: literati culture from
Minamoto no Shitagō to Ōe no Masafusa
brian steininger

Established in the late seventh century to support the state’s growing need for
literate bureaucrats, the State Academy (Daigakuryō, literally “Bureau of
Higher Education”) was modeled closely on the Chinese civil service exam-
ination and accompanying educational apparatus. However, whereas imper-
ial China later developed a powerful class of “examination elite,” Japan’s
literati were concentrated in the lower nobility, largely alienated from
political influence. The status of the Academy was bolstered during the
reign and retirement of Emperor Saga (r. 809–23, d. 842), but the tenth
century brought a sharp decline in Academy enrollment by children of the
highest-ranked households, as well as the number of Academy graduates on
the Council of State. In subsequent centuries, the lasting image of Heian
literati has been the “clownish, wretched, unkempt” professors of Yūgiri’s
school entrance ceremony in The Tale of Genji, puffed-up and pathetic amid
the smirks of their social betters.
At the same time that the upper nobility was losing interest in academic
education, changes within the Academy were concentrating those opportu-
nities left to graduates in the hands of a few established scholarly lineages.
The Academy’s temporary rise in status in the ninth century seems to have
encouraged a tendency toward familial privilege, and the displacement of
examination-based promotion by various forms of nomination eventually led
to a system of officially sanctioned nepotism within the Academy.
In 935, Letters Professor Ōe no Koretoki petitioned the throne to allow his
student Tachibana no Naomoto to take the taisaku examination (the highest-
level test for Letters students at the Academy), arguing that, “before [877],
many [examinees] were men who established their family’s name. But after
[889], there have only been sons and grandsons of scholars who carry on their
parent’s occupation. No more than four or five have [advanced] without
relying on family influence” (Ruijū fusenshō 9.249). The child of a professor

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had several advantages over other students, particularly access to a large

library – a vital prerequisite to scholarly authority in the absence of wide-
spread printing. Professors also controlled the scholarships that determined
test eligibility, and they naturally favored their children and disciples over
other students. The result was a concentration of power in the hands of
familial lineages including the Sugawara, the Ōe, the Kiyohara, and the
Nakahara. Prominent scholars from these households conducted private
tutorial circles (the most famous being the Sugawara school begun by
Michizane’s father Koreyoshi), which effectively supplanted the official cur-
riculum of the Academy in importance.
Parallel to this privatization of the public functions of the Academy was the
rise of family-sponsored dormitory-colleges, which gradually took on an
official role within the Academy’s administration. The most powerful was
the Kangakuin, established in 821 to provide room, board, and tutoring to
Fujiwara youths attending the Academy. By the eleventh century, this
institution successfully added several Fujiwara sub-branches to the short list
of privileged scholarly lineages. Apart from this addition, however, the
overall tendency in the Academy was toward increased inheritance of posts
and decreased potential for social mobility.
Inheritance of scholarly occupations was the rule by the end of the tenth
century. Already by the mid tenth century, men who were not born into an
established scholarly lineage were effectively precluded from the highest
level of scholarly posts. There are a few instances of such “unaffiliated”
students receiving permission to sit for examinations through a direct appeal
to the throne, but by the mid eleventh century even this ceases. Just as the
highest examinations were limited to the children of certain lineages, a
growing system of nominations (primarily controlled by the professors and
the heads of dormitory-colleges) took the place of testing as a means of
distributing offices to scholars. Thus the (ostensibly) merit-based testing
system itself became increasingly irrelevant over the course of the tenth
century. Especially talented men might seek adoption into a scholarly lineage
in order to have the opportunity for advancement.
A typical student who completed one of the four central curricula and
entered court service from the Academy could thereby receive a relatively
low-level (sixth to eighth rank) secretarial post in either the provinces or the
capital ministries and bureaux. These men mostly came from lower official-
dom, and even the most successful rarely rose above the fifth rank. Those
students with the family background to be nominated for scholarships and
higher examinations, on the other hand, could usually count on advancing

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into a fifth-rank administrative post, oftentimes serving directly under the

Council of State. In the early Heian, talented scholars were sometimes able to
rise to posts on the Council itself, but the hegemony of the Fujiwara Regents’
House effectively ended literati political influence. From the tenth century
onward, the fundamental prerequisite to political influence was the acquisi-
tion of tenjōbito (privy courtier) status, and by itself an Academy education
could not provide this. A hereditary scholar who received the appropriate
nominations might hope to eventually rise to fourth rank, confined to offices
traditionally held by his lineage.
Thus, when discussing the literati of the mid to late Heian, we need to
make a distinction between the broad mass of Academy graduates who
worked as clerks in the bureaucracy, and those specialist “Confucians”
(jusha) who derived from established scholarly lineages and monopolized
instructor posts in the Academy. The collection Gōdanshō (discussed below)
contains numerous anecdotes illustrating the friction between hereditary
scholars and unaffiliated students, as in this conversation about Sugawara
no Fumitoki (899–981), scion of the Sugawara lineage, and Minamoto no
Shitagō (911–83), a less prestigious student from the same Letters curriculum:
He said, “Do you understand Fumitoki’s work, ‘Song of an Old Man’s
Retirement’?” I replied no, but I had heard about the format . . . It begins
with a couplet of one-character lines, and increases to twelve characters per
line. He said, “Yes. It’s like a fan’s edge [spreading outward]. Fumitoki made
this song with careful thought over a period of three years. When he
finished, he first showed it to Shitagō. Shitagō read it, and in the space of a
night composed a response in the same format and sent it to Fumitoki.
Fumitoki was very upset at [Shitagō’s] thoughtlessness. Other people of the
time also criticized him. It’s not that the composition was mediocre, but he
showed no consideration or tact . . .” (5:73)
Shitagō’s mastery of Chinese-style composition was recognized, such that
Fumitoki might send him a draft of his new work (and he would be repeatedly
anthologized in the eleventh-century works Wakan rōeishū and Honchō monzui).
However, the aesthetic sensibility of the Heian court was intimately bound up
with a rigid class structure, and Fumitoki’s parentage, office, and rank all gave
him a cultural authority Shitagō could not possibly match (in Gōdanshō, it is
Fumitoki who is held up as a literary exemplar to be studied and imitated). This
distinction between hereditary and unaffiliated scholars was well established by
the end of the tenth century. The parody of Academy professors in The Tale of
Genji, mentioned earlier, might well be taken as a shot fired by the disadvan-
taged at those favored by institutionalized nepotism: Murasaki Shikibu’s father,

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Fujiwara no Tametoki, was an unaffiliated scholar who languished without a

post for ten years after the abdication of Emperor Kazan.1
From the mid-Heian onward, scholars from both groups adapted to the
changing social environment by seeking advancement through forms of
clientage, performing services for more powerful nobles. Just as in their
bureaucratic occupations, which often involved drafting Council decrees
and other official documents, these forms of patronage were primarily
dependent on a graduate’s training in formal composition. Academy students
and graduates were often called upon to compose poetry to provide enter-
tainment for banquets, both at court (including ritual celebrations such as the
Chrysanthemum Festival and unofficial poetry gatherings in the Imperial
Library or other palace offices) and at private parties. Banquet poetry was
almost without exception composed in the kudaishi (topic-line poetry) genre,
a form of Chinese-style regulated verse (lüshi) with a shared, set topic
appropriate to the occasion (e.g. “Chrysanthemums bloom and the riverbank
is fragrant” at a Chrysanthemum Banquet held in the riverside Reizei
Mansion) and a complex set of rules governing rhyme, prosody, and rheto-
rical technique. Sometimes in private communications and excursions out-
side the capital, poets broke with these rigid formal requirements to compose
what were labeled mudaishi (topic-less poems).
Graduates were also frequently commissioned to draft formal documents
such as hyō (memorials to the throne) and mōshibumi (petitions for promo-
tion), customarily written in an ornate, Chinese-style parallel prose (benrei-
bun, Chinese pianwen). Perhaps the most important form of unofficial
employment for Heian literati was the composition of formal religious
dedications called ganmon. These were presented by the sponsor of a
Buddhist mass or offering to detail his or her motivation and explain the
desired benefit. The most common variety was the funerary dedication,
presented as part of a service (hōe) to pray for the rebirth of the deceased in
paradise. The sponsors of such services frequently commissioned Academy
graduates to draft the accompanying ganmon (often with quite specific
instructions and demands for revisions).
Though eulogy and prayer are important components of these texts, the
content tends to focus particularly on the bereavement of the living, and they
served to bring an emotional climax to rituals of communal grief (described
vividly in Eiga monogatari). Typical of the genre is this portion of a piece
1
Saeki Masako, “Fujiwara no Tametoki no bungaku sekai to Genji monogatari,” in Genji
monogatari to kanbungaku, Wa-Kan hikaku bungaku sōsho 12 (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 1994),
163–82.

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commissioned from the academic Fujiwara no Akihira (d. 1066) by Fujiwara

no Sanenari, following the death of his son Kinnari in 1043:
I tried to chase his wandering ghost, but am lost among the living;
Unless he visits me in my dreams, I have no hope of reunion.
Grown accustomed to the clatter of his cart arriving,
My start at the thunder’s rumble turns to despair;
Remembering the curve of his drawn bow,
I gaze on the crescent moon and cannot sleep.
(Honchō zoku monzui 13.233)

Incorporating structure and language from both Buddhist liturgy and secular
Chinese belles-lettres, the grandiose aesthetic of ganmon was oriented
toward the public recitation of the text in Japanese (the stilted “translatio-
nese” of kundoku) by a “Lecturer” appointed from among the attendant
monks. In this way, ganmon served as the most important link between
the classical Chinese literary tradition and a growing body of shōdō (Buddhist
“sermon”) literature that would profoundly influence vernacular narrative in
the middle ages.
Though ganmon composition and other such scribal work were generally
privately contracted, unofficial employments of this sort were nevertheless
predicated on the same sorts of status and lineage distinctions as official post
assignments. If we consider the examples of Shitagō and Fumitoki mentioned
earlier, the unaffiliated scholar Shitagō’s writings are overwhelmingly asso-
ciated with private, informal entertainments like poetry gatherings. His few
formal commissions were all written on behalf of female aristocrats; for
example, when the wife of Shitagō’s most important patron, Minamoto no
Takaakira, died in 947, Shitagō was commissioned to write a ganmon on
behalf of the woman’s nurse (Chōya gunsai 2.30–1). By contrast, when
Takaakira presented a ganmon under his own name after the death of his
half-sister Kōshi in 957, it was written by Fumitoki, then Professor of Letters
at the Academy (Dai Nihon shiryō 1:10:346–7). Shitagō’s role was limited to the
domestic sphere rather than the publicly oriented composition that was the
mainstay of hereditary scholars like Fumitoki.
In addition to their various scribal occupations, many literati worked as
household tutors, delivering a classical education to elite families who had no
incentive to send their children to the Academy itself. In a diary entry of 1094,
Fujiwara no Munetada records a conversation with the statesman Fujiwara
no Michitoshi concerning the Chinese history Shiji (Records of the Grand
Historian). Michitoshi answers Munetada by reference to a “secret,” “oral

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teaching” he had received from his teacher, Ōe no Sukekuni, a hereditary

scholar.2 The Shiji was one of the central texts of the Academy’s Letters
curriculum, and we can see here how this curriculum was being repackaged
for the use of the upper nobility. As in the Academy, such education was
centered on imported Chinese texts, but this new context encouraged the
invention of local adaptations as well: both Shitagō and his student
Minamoto no Tamenori (d. 1011) produced encyclopedias of elementary
knowledge for their aristocratic patrons.
These tenth-century encyclopedias represent the beginning of a sea-
change in the literary output of Academy graduates. Lacking the prestigious,
court-sponsored compilation projects that were their raison d’être in the
early Heian, literati began producing new forms of practically oriented
scholarship. In the mid eleventh century, Fujiwara no Akihira produced the
first ōrai-mono, a form of textbook containing model letters for various
occasions that would become central to Japanese primary education over
the course of the medieval period. These epistolary models abandoned the
ornate parallel prose of formal Chinese-style writing for a utilitarian idiom
closer to Japanese syntax. In the twelfth century, Professor of Mathematics
Miyoshi no Tameyasu (1049–1139) produced the encyclopedia Shōchūreki
(Palm of the Hand Almanac) as well as Chōya gunsai (Collected Documents
of the Court and Country), a thirty-volume anthology of model compositions
in nearly every genre of Chinese-style writing, both administrative and
literary. Such anthologies (including, to some extent, Akihira’s Honchō monzui
and its sequel Honchō zoku monzui) were aimed at practical utility, focusing on
the genres of writing most useful to literati as they sought official employ-
ment or private patronage. They were accompanied by an increasing number
of reference works for composition, including instruction manuals, encyclo-
pedias of Chinese rhetoric, and rhyming dictionaries.3
Such efforts at adaptation, however, were not adequate to the fundamen-
tal changes overtaking aristocratic society by the eleventh century, and the
social position, educational standards, and financial stability of the Academy
all declined drastically in the second half of the Heian period. The last burst of
glory for the traditional scholarly families was Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111), a

2
Satō Michio, “Kyūtei bungaku to kyōiku,” in Ōchō bungaku to higashi Ajia no kyūtei
bungaku (Tokyo: Chikurinsha 2008), 490–508.
3
Examples of these latter three categories include Sakumon daitai (Essentials of
Composition, late tenth century, expanded late eleventh century), Sugawara no
Tamenaga’s Bunpōshō (Notes of the Decorated Phoenix, c. 1200), and Tameyasu’s Dōmō
shōin (Beginner’s Rhymer, 1109).

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child prodigy who tutored and advised three emperors, and was the first of
his lineage to sit on the Council of State in over a century. With the benefit of
an established position, Masafusa had no need to produce the kind of tutorial
or encyclopedic works described above, but he too seems to have tried to
adapt to the changing requirements of the court, best seen in his Gōke shidai
(Proceedings of the Ōe House), a compendium of court ritual. Over the
course of the Heian period, public ceremonies increasingly expanded beyond
the scope of codified law, which created a vital role for knowledge of court
precedent and ritual (yūsoku kojitsu). Members of the imperial family and
Regents’ House had responded to this need by keeping diaries and detailed
records of important ceremonies, but Gōke shidai shows the literati attempt-
ing to establish authority over this body of practical knowledge.
Near the end of his life, Masafusa’s student Fujiwara no Sanekane (1085–
1112) began keeping a record of his conversations with his teacher, Gōdanshō
(Ōe Conversations, c. 1108), an important influence on later setsuwa literature.
In one passage, Masafusa laments the decline of his household and the wider
Academy tradition:
I do not have any concerns before society. My only regrets are that I was
never Head Chamberlain, and that none of my sons have come to anything.
If I had a son like you there would be nothing to worry about. Instead, all the
books and secrets of my household will vanish – particularly our secret
teachings on the [Chinese] histories and classics will all come to nothing,
for I have no one to pass them on to. (5:73)
Underlying Masafusa’s complaint is the premise that the traditions of aca-
demic knowledge were now entirely a private, familial inheritance, rather
than deriving any sort of shared institutional continuity from the Academy
itself. The Academy was an early victim of the erosion of the central
government’s finances. From the mid eleventh century onward, there are
records of bureaucrats buying posts by making donations for the upkeep of
Academy buildings, and other suggestions that the grounds were falling into
disrepair. After the Academy was destroyed by fire in 1177, there was little
impetus to rebuild it – it had probably long since ceased being a site for
education.
From this point on, the classical scholarly tradition in Japan would be
dependent on a fragile network of secret and fiercely guarded transmissions
among a few households. The new Kamakura government still had use for
the administrative skills of hereditary scholars such as Ōe no Hiromoto and
Miyoshi no Yasunobu, and there remained a deep respect for the Chinese

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political-philosophical tradition – immediately following the Jōkyū War of

1221, Hōjō Masako commissioned Sugawara no Tamenaga to produce a
Japanese translation of Zhenguan zhengyao (Essentials of Government in the
Zhenguan Period), an eighth-century anecdotal guide to enlightened rule.
Nevertheless, the scholarly households’ cultural importance as synthesizers
and purveyors of continental learning was rapidly being eclipsed by the
emerging Zen monasteries, from which would spring the efflorescence of
Gozan literature in the fourteenth century.

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 17
Heian canons of Chinese poetry: Wakan
rōeishū and Bai Juyi
ivo smits

One classic that was especially dominant in the Heian period is Baishi wenji
(Collected Works of Bai Juyi, J. Hakushi monjū or Hakushi bunshū, 839). If the
anthology Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Literature, J. Monzen, early sixth
century) was an illustrious classic used in academic education, then the
works of the Chinese poet Bai (Bo) Juyi (J. Haku Kyoi, 772–846) were truly
popular. The Japanese discovery in 838 of poems by Bai, who would
become better known as Haku Rakuten (the Japanese reading of his “art
name” Letian), resulted in a poetic frenzy. The demand for a complete set of
Bai’s works grew rapidly and Japanese monks visiting Tang China, such as
Ennin (794–864) and Egaku (active 835–64), brought back copies of his
collected works. Bai was himself aware of his success abroad. At home
Japanese literati decorated their houses with his portrait. Women at court,
too, enjoyed reading and reciting his poetry. Sei Shōnagon in her Pillow
Book occasionally drops casual references to his lines, and Empress Shōshi
(var. Akiko, 988–1074) is known to have actively studied his poetry under
the tutelage of her lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu.
The degree to which Bai’s poetry outshone that of his Tang contempor-
aries in the Japanese constellation of the poetic universe is quite remarkable
and is not merely a reflection of the contemporary Chinese canon.
Nevertheless, one important reason for this Japanese success of Bai Juyi
most likely was his huge popularity in China. Heian monks travelling
through that country could not fail to see that every Chinese seemed to
be reading him. The simplicity of Bai’s language and the ease with which his
poems could be read undoubtedly contributed to this phenomenal success
as well.
Heian readers genuinely enjoyed Bai Juyi’s poetry, but they did not
necessarily pick up on all dimensions of his work. One intriguing example
of this is the Heian love for his xinyuefu (J. shingafu) or “new ballads.” The

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 Heian canons of Chinese poetry: Wakan rōeishū and Bai Juyi

“new ballads” promoted by Bai were a genre of rather long poems in a

relatively free form, criticizing in a simple tone social and political wrongs.
The Heian fondness for Bai’s often explicitly political ballads is somewhat
odd, given that whatever the Japanese nobility liked about Chinese culture,
their political ideas were diametrically opposed to the ballads’ implications.
Heian courtiers showed little compassion for the lowest classes of society,
nor did they believe that administration should be a matter of proven
competence rather than birth, as was the professed case in China, let alone
that a government official’s duty should be to call the monarch’s attention to
injustices in the realm. Nevertheless, Bai’s ballads certainly were popular.
Heian courtiers did not care much for their message, but prized their
descriptive passages and imitated them in their own poetry. When
Murasaki Shikibu studied with her empress, it was the ballads that served
as their reading material. When excerpts of Bai Juyi’s poetry were singled out
for copying, as a present for instance, it was usually his “ballads” that were
chosen. Japanese courtiers organized study sessions to discuss these poems.
In short, when Heian nobles mentioned “ballads” they invariably meant Bai
Juyi’s new ballads.

Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese

Poems to Sing, early eleventh century)
The incorporation of Bai Juyi’s poetry, and by extension other literary texts
from China, into the Heian literary worldview is reflected by Wakan rōeishū,
edited by Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041). This important yet slightly enigmatic
anthology was followed by a number of very similar compilations, not all of
which are extant. The first and best-known emulation is Shinsen rōeishū (New
Selection of Poems to Sing, c. 1116–22, alt. 1122–33).
Wakan rōeishū is an anthology of poetry in Chinese or Sino-Japanese
(kanshi) and Japanese (waka) organized in thematic rubrics. Compiler
Fujiwara no Kintō juxtaposed waka with over eighth hundred couplets by
Japanese and Chinese kanshi poets. The anthology is one of the first occur-
rences of the term “wakan” to denote the variety of encounters between
“Japanese” (wa) and “Chinese” (kan) cultural entities, but in at least two
respects it belies assumptions about equality between kanshi and waka. Not
only is Bai Juyi the best-represented poet, with 138 couplets, but subsequent use
of and commentary on the anthology has from the start focused almost
exclusively on its kanshi couplets. Also, standard arrangement of poetry

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 ivo smits

within the rubrics follows a suggestive hierarchy: first couplets by poets from
China, then kanshi by Japanese poets, and finally waka.
Wakan rōeishū is divided into two books, or volumes, which in turn are
divided into a variety of sections, many of which are reminiscent of collec-
tions from China or Japanese anthologies inspired by such Chinese categor-
izations. The first book covers the four seasons, in gradual procession from
early spring to the end of winter and the end of the year. The second book is a
miscellaneous arrangement of often intriguing categories, from monkeys and
recluses to courtesans and the color white. These categories can be grouped
into nine larger groups: heavenly phenomena, animals and plants, song and
literature (tellingly including the category “Wine”), mountains and rivers,
dwellings, Buddhist matters, human affairs, people, and emotions.
Wakan rōeishū’s categorical organization of themes was wedded to an
intense interest in isolated or “extracted” couplets (tekku), which in turn
reflected kanshi composition practices of the period. Two typical poetic
forms were kudaishi (verse-topic poetry) and ku (isolated couplets). These
two forms are very much related and may be best understood by consider-
ing couplets as poetic entities on their own that might be fragments on their
way toward a completed poem. Throughout the tenth and eleventh cen-
turies the dominant form for kanshi in Japan was the “verse topic poem.”
These were eight-line lüshi (regulated poems, J. risshi) composed to set
topics consisting of a five-character line of verse, the so-called kudai (verse
topic). The “regulated poem” was a genre that established itself in Tang
China and strongly valued skilled composition of couplets in the “parallel”
style, but the “verse topic” variety was typical for Heian Japan.
Consequently, poetry handbooks used examples by Japanese poets when
they discussed the handling of such topics. The Heian fondness for isolating
“fine couplets” (jiaju, J. kaku) of Chinese poetry and parallel prose finds its
culmination in Wakan rōeishū.
The title suggests that the poems were intended as a repertoire for
chanting (rōei). The habit of singing lines of Chinese poetry was an old
one; the narrator of Tosa nikki (Tosa Journal, c. 935) writes how “[the men]
raised their voices and chanted Chinese poems (karauta).” The term “rōei”
referred specifically to the chanting of poetry in Chinese; waka were also
“sung”, but for that act a different verb was used. There is no doubt that
couplets were chanted a lot; that much we can tell from medieval diaries,
tales, and anecdote collections. In fact, Heian Japan sometimes appears to
be singing all the time. However, rōei chanting for all practical purposes
had no need to rely on Kintō’s anthology and the vast majority of his

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 Heian canons of Chinese poetry: Wakan rōeishū and Bai Juyi

selection never made it to the rōei repertoire. If indeed the poems in Kintō’s
collection were meant to be sung, the irony of history is that, rather than a
textbook of songs, it quickly became a primer for learning Chinese and a
calligraphy model book for the practice of mana (kanji graphs) and kana
writing styles.

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 18
The Literary Essence of Our Court
(Honchō monzui)
wiebke denecke

In the history of kanshibun (Sino-Japanese literature) it is hard to find another

anthology that was so receptive to the practical needs of its times, yet stayed
so influential into the early modern period. Compiled by Fujiwara no Akihira
(c. 989–1066), Honchō monzui (Literary Essence of Our Court) is a repository
of model pieces featuring genres that an educated Heian man needed to
master in order to participate in court life, perform duties within the court
bureaucracy, or draft texts for patrons of religious ceremonies. That Akihira
had a complicated relationship to the scholarly world of his time and included
pieces that fit his wits – from regretful and reclusive to parodic and graphic –
makes for a colorful model anthology. With it he established the fame of the
scholarly Fujiwara Ceremonial Branch. He seems to side with, but also to
lament and, at times, to parody the contemporary scholarly world, where
success was hard to earn, and political and financial reward was meager.
Although a descendant of the Kaifūsō poet-official Umakai, Akihira did not
come from an established scholar family, such as the Ōe or Sugawara, who
feature richly in his anthology. He passed the examinations only in his early
forties. His involvement in two examination scandals, where he helped
candidates and encouraged a failed candidate to have his examination reas-
sessed, certainly did not advance his career. Only in his late sixties did he
receive a significant post in the Ministry of Ceremonial, advancing to fourth
rank in the years before his death, when he was appointed Professor of
Letters, Tutor of the Crown Prince, and Director of the State Academy in
quick succession. Akihira was a talented kanshi poet and also composed waka.
But his fame rests on three model collections that captured the trends and
served the needs of his time: Literary Essence showcases scholarly genres;
Meigō ōrai (Akihira’s Letters) features models for personal correspondence;
and Shinsarugakuki (Account of New Monkey Music), on the surface an
account of a right palace guard’s and his vast family’s visit to a carnivalesque

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 The Literary Essence of Our Court (Honchō monzui)

night of popular entertainment, parades portrayals of types and professions,

ranging from provincial governors, students, Yin-Yang masters, and monks
to sumo wrestlers, prostitutes, gluttons, and gamblers.
Akihira compiled Literary Essence toward the end of his life, when his scholarly
posts gave him access to many documents. Canvassing about two centuries of
kanshibun from the Saga through the GoIchijō courts (c. 810–1037), he selected
427 pieces by seventy authors (excluding lower-ranking officials, monks, and
women) for a vast panorama in fourteen volumes, arranged by thirty-nine
genres, with a special focus on the Engi, Tenryaku, and Kankō eras, high points
for courtly kanshibun. Genres composed at court banquets – fu (rhapsodies) and
shi (poetry) – make up the first volume, followed by five volumes featuring
clerical genres of the imperial bureaucracy, either communicating orders down
the imperial hierarchy, such as shō (edicts), chokutō (imperial responses) or kanpu
(State Council decrees), or communicating information or requests upwards,
such as taisakubun (civil service examination essays), hyō (memorials to the
throne), or sōjō (petitions). Volume Seven contains largely samples of shōjō
(private correspondence), followed by four voluminous books of shijo (poetry
prefaces), an increasingly prestigious genre written to accompany the poetry
composed during banquets or outings. Volume Twelve is a medley of genres
from mei (inscriptions) and ki (accounts), to san (encomia) and den (biographies);
and the last two books provide model texts for religious events, most notably
the popular ganmon (wishes), detailing the motivation and hopes of sponsors, or
also saimon (prayers) addressed to deities.
Though it was the first anthology to feature a vast panorama of Sino-
Japanese genres, Literary Essence took cues from previous collections. Inspired
by the central importance of the Wenxuan, the sixth-century Chinese anthol-
ogy of ornamental prose and poetry that was a major textbook for students
in the “History and Literature track” (kidendō) at the Heian Academy, Akihira
may have tried to create a Wenxuan for Japan. Ōsone Shōsuke argues that
Akihira produced a fourteen-volume “complement” to the sixteen-volume
Fusōshū – a voluminous collection of predominantly risshi (regulated poetry)
compiled by Ki no Tadana and offered to Emperor Ichijō – to match the thirty
volumes of the Wenxuan; that this mainstream genre of Heian kanshi is
conspicuously absent from Literary Essence supports this hypothesis. By
featuring thirty-nine genres, just as in his Chinese model, Akihira paid
homage to the Wenxuan, but his own collection was clearly geared toward
the exigencies of mid-Heian Japan. He adopted not even a third of the
Wenxuan’s categories and filled the roster with genres relevant to Heian
reality, such as bureaucratic genres like iki (“appointment documents”) or

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wakajo (waka prefaces) written in kanbun prose for the waka produced at
poetry events and contests. Except for “prayers” all the genres in the last two
books are of Japanese origin.
But even genres with the same name could be two different things: the
majority of the nine “prefaces” in the Wenxuan are for literary collections and
thus not comparable to the 150 “poetry prefaces” in Literary Essence, which
were testimony to the distinctively Japanese genre of kudaishi (“topic
poetry”), regulated poems composed on five-character topic lines according
to a strict rhetorical template; they provided a prime occasion for Heian
courtiers to attract the attention of patrons with their sophisticated parallel
prose and their erudite command of Chinese reference anecdotes. Similarly,
sōjō (petitions) were typically pieces remonstrating against policies; absent
from the Wenxuan, they appear in Tang wencui (Tang Literary Essence, 1011),
another model for Akihira’s collection, which also inspired its title; but
Akihira focused on scholars’ petitions for advancement of rank or post,
highlighting their unfortunate situation as their career prospects deteriorated
with the decline of the ritsuryō system since the tenth century. Such a
difference in political practices is also visible in hyō (“memorials”), which
cover various topics in the Wenxuan, but are mostly “resignation memorials”
from top-level officials in Akihira’s collection. Although the custom of
repeatedly submitting resignation requests existed in China, it is not docu-
mented in Wenxuan or Tang wencui, while Literary Essence includes many
memorials of multiple resignations, of up to four times.
Another less conspicuous model for Akihira’s anthology that was at least
equally important to its success was Fujiwara Kintō’s Wakan rōeishū, a
collection of poetry couplets, parallel prose lines, and waka for chanting:
Akihira included the integral texts of 90 percent of its 106 Sino-Japanese prose
excerpts in Literary Essence. Akihira was an avid collector of exquisite lines,
which was popular during his time, but his couplet anthology is lost. With
more than a fifth of Literary Essence he contextualized favorite lines of his day
and thus created, in part, a “deselected” couplet anthology.
In contrast to its Chinese models, dissent, criticism, and parody of court life
has a prominent place in Literary Essence. Akihira was certainly critical of the
scholarly world, but he also disapproved of the low impact scholars had on
political affairs. This resonated with disappointment among mid-Heian lit-
erati, who were even less likely to make a good government career with the
ascendancy of the regency system and the Fujiwara. Most of the leading
authors included in Literary Essence are evidence of this situation. For exam-
ple, Sugawara no Michizane died in exile precipitated by Fujiwara intrigues,

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and his grandson Fumitoki had a late start to his career, reaching third rank
only in the year of his death. Ōe no Masahira, the central figure of the other
major scholarly lineage, harbored misgivings throughout his life for not
having reached beyond a mid-ranking career. But even royal family members
could be victims of Fujiwara power politics: Minamoto no Kaneakira, son of
Emperor Daigo, was forced out of his position as Minister of the Left by
Regent Fujiwara no Kanemichi and bitterly lamented this fate in the
“Rhapsody on Tuqiu,” with ominous reference to the assassination of
Duke Yin of Lu, who, according to the Zuozhuan, built a residence at Tuqiu
to retire in old age, but was killed when about to abdicate. He aligns himself
with Chinese scholar-officials who suffered grand injustice, such as the Han
dynasty minister Jia Yi.
Pieces by Yoshishige no Yasutane and Minamoto no Shitagō show the broad
spectrum of tones of dissent Akihira included: Yasutane, scion of a Yin-Yang
family turned scholar and later monk, represents a contemplative take on the
problem. In “Account of my Pond Pavilion” he envisions a reclusive life guided
by moral self-cultivation and learning at his retreat, away from the evils of
court politics. Yasutane’s account formulates much that Kamo no Chōmei
voiced two centuries later in Hōjōki (Account of my Ten-Square-Foot Hut),
also a confession of reclusion and social disgust, but he is still more ambiva-
lently caught between dreams of political significance (demanded by his
Confucian values as well as his personal ambition) and an alternative life,
allowing him “a body at court and a mind’s ambition set on reclusion.”
Minamoto no Shitagō, the scintillating scholar-poet and never more than
mid-ranking official, illustrates the sting of bitter social satire that also appears
in Literary Essence. In Song of a Tailless Cow he extols the invisible virtues of his
seemingly handicapped treasure: it doesn’t dirty its behind with a tail when
pooping, is not put to hard work, and is never stolen because uniquely
recognizable by the authorities, etc. His closing promise to repay his cow
once he himself gets promoted is a barely veiled way to say that Shitagō treats
his beast better than the emperor treats his loyal scholar-officials.
But parody and satire also appear in less somber tones in Literary Essence
and show Akihira’s interest in playful modes and liminal topics. Structurally,
we see this in his idiosyncratic choices for the “poetry” section: even if we
accept the argument that Akihira excluded regulated poetry because of other
existing collections, he indulges in literary games: acrostic poetry, palin-
dromes, and the only Heian example of kyōka (“crazy song”), a kanshi
genre that became popular in the Edo period. Stylistically, we see this interest
in Akihira’s selection of plain prose (in contrast to the officially dominant

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ornate parallel prose), which shows the impact of mid-Tang “Returning to

Antiquity” movements. Thematically, Akihira included pieces treating super-
natural and non-courtly worlds. The sexually explicit pieces are hard to pin
down: Ōe no Asatsuna’s “Rhapsody on Marriage” articulates not just court-
ship, as vernacular diaries and tales were doing during this time, but includes
a yin-yang physiology of sexual fluids; an anonymous biography of an “iron
hammer” (possibly authored by Akihira under the pseudonym “Organ
Extraordinary”) traces the career of a penis in court service. Did Akihira,
who was interested in educational model books, take the opportunity to
teach people sex vocabulary while having some academic fun? Or did he
include these pieces to mock the repressed literary decorum at court and
ridicule bureaucratic structures by viewing them through the career course
of a male organ? Such literature must have existed for fun and entertainment
(erotic pieces by Bai Juyi’s brother Bai Xingjian may have inspired the
Japanese poets), but why did Akihira choose them for his model anthology?
Without doubt, “Japan’s Wenxuan” would have alienated Xiao Tong, Crown
Prince Zhaoming of the Liang, the compiler of the original Wenxuan.
The great number of surviving manuscripts from late Heian on – with
favorite books often circulating independently of the entire anthology – and
printings in 1629 and 1648 show that Literary Essence was a continuous success. It
set the tone for subsequent anthologies: The compilers of Honchō zoku monzui,
the sequel to Literary Essence, and the administrative anthology Chōya gunsai
(Compendium of Texts for Court and Provinces) adapted much of Akihira’s
framework. Lines from Literary Essence are often mentioned in medieval war
tales, travel accounts, epistolary collections, and even kana prose, and despite
the turn away from ornate parallel prose to Song-dynasty-style Old Prose in the
Edo period it still retained its model value for certain genres and occasions. For
a collection that propagated the personal concerns and peculiar tastes of a
pleasure-loving, if disillusioned, mid-Heian scholar-official, this was a highly
successful career.

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 19
Vernacular histories: Eiga monogatari,
Ōkagami, Gukanshō
elizabeth oyler

Historical writing in Japan was infused with new life and meaning with the
appearance of two significant works casting the life and times of Fujiwara no
Michinaga (966–1027) against a backdrop of dynastic history: Eiga monogatari
(A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, completed c. early twelfth century) and
Ōkagami (The Great Mirror, c. twelfth century). The most powerful of the
Fujiwara chancellors and regents, Michinaga was also famously the patron of
Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote at least some of Genji monogatari during her
service in the salon of Michinaga’s daughter, Empress Shōshi. Thought to
have been written by a court lady known as Akazome Emon, Eiga monogatari
is the earliest narrative account of the splendor of Michinaga’s age. Ōkagami
has not been convincingly attributed to a specific author, though scholars
generally believe he was a high-ranking aristocratic male.
Eiga monogatari is often cited as the inaugural work of rekishi monogatari
(historical tales). It is considered a history primarily because of its structure: it
traces the arc of Michinaga’s rise against history measured in the reigns of
sovereigns, starting from Uda. Comprised of a thirty-chapter text followed by
a ten-chapter continuation, Eiga monogatari’s main body documents the
history of the central court, and particularly the Fujiwara family, from
Uda’s time through the rites following the death of Michinaga in 1027. The
second part begins three years later and continues through 1092. Although
presented as a dynastic history, the work is written in kana, a departure from
the tradition of official historical writing found in the Rikkokushi (Six National
Histories), the primary historical records preceding Eiga monogatari.
Akazome Emon, who served as a lady-in-waiting to Michinaga’s primary
wife, Rinshi, seems the most likely author for the first thirty chapters.
Arguments for single authorship of the entire work have been made, but
scholars generally agree that the final ten chapters were written by someone
else, also a woman, who may or may not have had close ties to Akazome

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Emon, perhaps Iwade no Ben. It is likely that the first thirty were written
before 1045 and that the others may have been completed by the early twelfth
century. The oldest dated manuscript was transcribed in the early seven-
teenth century, but twelfth-century records refer to something called Eiga
monogatari, suggesting that some relative of the present text was circulating at
that time.
The work opens where the National Histories leave off. The eiga (flowering
fortunes) of the title refers to the life of Michinaga, the most conspicuous
Fujiwara scion. The main body of the text focuses on his life and those of his
immediate family members, particularly their unparalleled political and
social successes: two of Michinaga’s daughters gave birth to sovereigns and
attained the status of retired empress, and his sons rose to the highest political
positions in the realm. One argument supporting Akazome’s authorship of
the work is that she would have had access to Michinaga’s family through her
service to his wife; the narrator’s point of view suggests the vantage of a lady-
in-waiting within the household. This interpretation is buttressed by her
marriage to Ōe Masahira (952–1012), a member of the long-standing and
recognized family of scholars responsible for, among other things, the com-
pilation of the fifth of the National Histories, the Montoku jitsuroku.
Nevertheless, Eiga monogatari departs radically from the histories that
preceded it. The National Histories consciously imitated continental annals,
including the Zuo-chuan, Shiji, Hanshu, and Hou Hanshu, but only partially.
Where continental histories included analysis of events and separate biogra-
phies, their Japanese descendants did not. Compiled between c. 720 and 905,
the National Histories all consist of carefully dated entries recording events of
public significance, with few modifications and additions.
By the lifetime of Eiga monogatari’s author, the annalistic history was an
established genre with a long tradition, complemented by the practice of
holding lectures on the Nihon shoki on several occasions during the eighth
through tenth centuries; the goal of these “oral recitation[s] and explication[s]
of the inaugural history” was to “reaffirm the bonds between the tennō
[sovereign] and the court” (Bialock 2007, 151). This points to an ongoing
dialogue between modes of presentation that would continue to mark
historical discourse in generations to come: the orally performed “text” and
the written, documentary one.
Although Eiga monogatari follows a chronology marked by important
events in the lives of sovereigns, it differs dramatically from the National
Histories in form, narrative focus, style, and language. Organized into chap-
ters rather than under dated entries, it is a narrative, as implied by the

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“monogatari” of its title. It opens with a brief account of the rise in fortunes of
Michinaga’s forebears, framed by the successive reigns of sovereigns.
Anecdotes about each ruler illustrate both his character and the times, in
the tradition of continental histories. At no point, however, is the narrator
overtly censorious – Eiga monogatari was clearly also operating in the context
of Japanese histories, which existed to praise the unbroken lineage of rulers.
Thus both historical circumstances and narrative exigency demanded fore-
grounding the role of the ministers and regents. Good rule is portrayed as
reliant on an exceptional succession of powerful advisors to ensure peace and
stability.
An even greater departure from the National Histories is Eiga monogatari’s
emphasis on interpersonal relationships, particularly the marriage politics
surrounding powerful men. Eiga monogatari is a view from the inner quarters,
intensely interested in the daily lives of wives and consorts, their blood
relatives, and their offspring, rather than a record of the court’s official
business. How sovereigns and ministers navigated potentially volatile dis-
appointments regarding the marriages and promotions of royal consorts and
princes demonstrated their strengths and weaknesses in the face of adversity.
Women also are judged, based on their resourcefulness, fecundity, and
dignity under duress.
Politically important events are presented from the vantage point of a
narrator whose access to the kinds of information found in the National
Histories is mediated but whose knowledge of the home lives of her prota-
gonists is first-hand. In these respects, Eiga monogatari reveals its deeper debt
to another important predecessor, Genji monogatari, Murasaki Shikibu’s opus
that foregrounds point of view, provides behind-the-screens perspective on
events, and privileges the emotional and interpersonal. The reliance of Eiga
monogatari’s author on the Murasaki Shikibu nikki (Murasaki Shikibu Diary)
for accounts of events has also been noted (McCullough and McCullough,
vol. 1, 52–63).
Eiga monogatari’s narrative voice is a vitally important departure from
official histories. The narrator is chatty and intimate, speaking to the reader
in the first person. She obviously favors some of her subjects more than
others, often commenting on the elegance, joy, or pathos of a given situation
in colloquial, albeit formulaic style. Her judgments are usually brief and
elliptical, but they occur often enough to remind us of her presence and
her individual voice. Her observations often are formulated as descriptive
passages punctuated by a brief personal remark or conjecture that reminds
the reader of her presence, in a form reminiscent of Genji monogatari. Also like

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Genji, such personal, telling moments are nested within depictions of public
pageantry, as in her portrayal of the procession that was part of the
Purification Rituals on the twenty-third day of the Tenth Month, Kanna
2 (986), when Michinaga’s father, Kaneie, was serving as regent:
The Regent [Kaneie] appeared toward the end of the procession, accompa-
nied by impressively correct Escorts and a select retinue of well-bred,
handsome outriders and other attendants. As the party passed, Prince
Atsumichi [Kaneie’s young grandson and ward] pushed open a blind at the
Higashisanjō stand and leaned out . . .
“Hello, Grandpa!” he shouted to Kaneie.
“Behave yourself,” the Regent scolded, but he smiled with affection as he
gazed on him. The onlookers must have been amused too.
(McCullough and McCullough, vol. 1, 139–40)

Michinaga’s own paternal devotion appears at another public moment,

during the bathing ceremony for his new grandson, the future sovereign
GoReizei. Having taken the tonsure, Michinaga watches the proceedings
from behind a folding screen, but cannot resist the urge to peek over the top
from time to time, much to the amusement of other onlookers.
Such passages reveal an author drawing a telling, personal portrait within a
public context. Official events thus become the framework for recounting a
particular family’s history, which is in large part the story of the personal lives
of its members. Eiga monogatari presents a more overt version of what Genji
accomplishes so subtly yet forcefully in its fictionalized world: a blurring of
the presumed boundary between “public” and “private,” the oft-cited “filling
in the details” version of history at the heart of Genji and Tamakazura’s
debate about monogatari in the “Hotaru” chapter of Genji monogatari.
The presumption of modern critics, derived in large part from literary
vignettes such as the Genji’s monogatari debate, is that Heian writing indeed
recognized a border between public and private storytelling, one most often
marked in texts by gender and language. Kana is for private, “feminine”
discourse, and kanji for public, “masculine” writing. And perceptible to Heian
aristocrats as the compartmentalization of discourse probably was, Eiga
monogatari, like Genji monogatari before it, questions the normative status of
such categories; indeed, the malleability of the monogatari form from very
early on represented a means for complicating this paradigm, as Bialock
notes. Eiga monogatari is a history, yet it is written in kana and from what
we think of as a feminine perspective. It is a monogatari that weaves a public
history of what the hero of Genji monogatari describes as the “truly rewarding

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particulars,” judging both past and present through great figures of the times,
but basing its critiques on their behavior as spouses and parents, friends and
rivals in everyday life, in poetry exchanges, and at celebrations. The context
serves to draw attention to the intense public importance of the events
described in the work, both “public” and “private,” underscoring the dual
nature of births, deaths, comings-of-age, marriages, and promotions, thereby
problematizing the very idea of separate spheres.

Ōkagami (The Great Mirror)

Ōkagami was probably written sometime after Eiga monogatari, and most
likely with that work in mind (McCullough, 65). The work has been variously
attributed to Fujiwara Tamenari, to Fujiwara Yoshinobu (one of Michinaga’s
sons), and, in the Tokugawa period, to various members of the Minamoto
family. Like Eiga monogatari, Ōkagami is framed as a dynastic history written
in kana, but the two differ markedly in form and narrative voice. In imitation
of continental models, Ōkagami opens with an annalistic account of the reigns
of the sovereigns from Montoku (r. 850–8) to GoIchijō (r. 1016–36). This
section, which comprises only about one-ninth of the text, is followed by a
much longer collection of twenty biographies of important men, all members
of Michinaga’s Fujiwara lineage. Michinaga’s is the last, longest, and most
complete. Ōkagami concludes with a short final section of “monogatari”
about the Fujiwara (Fujiwara-shi monogatari), the past (Mukashi monogatari),
and later days (Gojitsu monogatari) that includes anecdotes about both
the Fujiwara and their contemporaries – sovereigns, ministers, poets of
note. Scholars note the influence of setsuwa (anecdotes) in this section, and
indeed the era of Ōkagami’s composition roughly coincided with the compi-
lation of the great compendium of setsuwa, Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of
Times Now Past, c. 1120).
Unlike the single narrator of Eiga monogatari whose voice ranged between
the first person and something approaching the third person so familiar in
older monogatari, Ōkagami presents a number of speakers in conversation
with each other, all described by a narrator who directly addresses the reader.
The preface describes the setting for both the annals and the biographies to
follow. While attending a sutra reading at the Urin’in, the narrator comes
upon “three people of extraordinary and disturbing antiquity – two gray-
beards and a crone, who had, it seemed, sat down in the same place by
chance” (McCullough, 65). The three range in age from 150 to 190. The two
old men then recount the historical period through which they or their

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acquaintances have lived – from the reign of Montoku (the subject of the fifth
of the National Histories, Montoku jitsuroku) through the “present” of 1025,
roughly the same territory covered by the first thirty books of Eiga mono-
gatari. The two old men identify themselves as Ōyake no Yotsugi and
Natsuyama Shigeki, and, to pass the time while waiting for the preacher,
Yotsugi suggests, “Well, since there’s nothing else to do, what do you say?
Shall I give you a story about the old days to let these people know what
things were like?” (McCullough, 67). Thus begins their account of the story of
Michinaga’s rise.
Scholars have long remarked upon the symbolic elements in the two
men’s identities. Both are okina, or “old men” figures, associated with a
tradition in performing arts ranging from Shiki-sanba to the noh drama.
Often, okina are manifestations of deities, and they are almost always
uncannily knowledgeable; part of the authority of the narrative of Ōkagami
derives from the evocation of this felicitous, superhuman character type.
Yotsugi, whose name literally means “chronicle of a great house,” is the elder
and consistently the leader; he recounts a generally felicitous tale of
Michinaga’s grandeur. There is a clear trajectory to his story, from the reigns
of emperors to the life of Michinaga, announced in the preface framing the
chronicle. The traditional forms of the annal and the biography thus are
emplotted within a narrative putatively aiming toward the full splendor of
Michinaga’s domination of the court by the end of his life.
The experimentation with form here is amplified by an equally complex
use of voice. Although Yotsugi is the primary storyteller, the context is the
story-in-the-round. Yotsugi is always in dialogue with Shigeki, who both
prompts him and, particularly in the records of Fujiwara scions, contradicts
him. The two are joined in conversation by the old woman, who we learn is
Shigeki’s wife, and a young samurai attendant. The attendant is a rapt
audience, and, like Shigeki, interjects questions, corrections, and comments;
the wife occasionally is asked to supply parts of stories. The rest of the
auditors at the Urin’in provide an additional layer of audience, and the
narrator of the work himself of course mediates between the scene of story-
telling and the reader. As in Eiga monogatari, the interface between text and
reader is conversational, but here it mirrors the storyteller–audience relation-
ship found in the text. This context underlines the vitality of the spoken voice
while simultaneously organizing it in written documentary form.
Yotsugi’s opening monologue chronicling generations of sovereigns is
only occasionally punctuated by a comment from the narrator about the
responses of the audience, the attendant, Shigeki, or himself. Yotsugi’s

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narrative is brisk, with some descriptions including only several paragraphs

describing a sovereign’s parentage (with due attention given his mother, an
issue of significance because of the vital role Fujiwara women played as the
mothers of sovereigns) and outlining his career. The section concludes with
the old men’s ruminations on the analogy at the heart of the account, history-
as-mirror. The title Ōkagami (Great Mirror) was probably established at a
somewhat later date. It refers, first, to a passage from Sima Qian’s Shiji: “One
who lives in the present age and considers the ways of the past has a mirror
wherein he can see that the two are not necessarily alike” (Watson, vol. 1,
493). Secondarily, it refers to the scene from the “second preface” following
the royal annals, when Shigeki remarks, “Your descriptions of all those
emperors have been just like reflections in a mirror. Now that you are
going to tell us about the ministers too, I feel like a man witnessing a glorious
sunrise after years in the dark” (McCullough, 85). He goes on to compare the
brightness of Yotsugi’s “mirror” with the dull mirror his wife keeps at home,
and the two end up composing poems comparing their narrative to a mirror
revealing past, present, and future.
The felicitous poetry exchange and the men’s exaggerated bluster about
their great age in this segment underscore their identity as okina figures, but
simultaneously are marked by playfulness and humor – the narrator notes in
fact that Shigeki’s enthusiasm “struck the rest of us as rather comical”
(McCullough, 85). The men continue to compare their “historical” narrative
mirror to women’s ornamental ones, undermining the potential ceremonious-
ness of the moment by levity. Yotsugi then states: “Enough of trivialities . . . I
am going to discuss serious matters now. Pay close attention, everyone. Just as
you must look on today’s exposition of holy writ as an aid to enlightenment, so
you should think, as you listen to me, that you are hearing the Chronicles of
Japan (Nihongi)” (McCullough, 87). Significantly, the metaphor of the history-
as-mirror is drawn only after he has run through the royal chronologies, a
rhetorical move undermining the importance of the royal annals in favor of the
Fujiwara biographies. Further, casting the men’s discourse as near comedy also
calls into question the seriousness of the entire project.
When Yotsugi moves into the biographies of the Fujiwara, he becomes
more loquacious, portraying his protagonists as memorable characters. Time
runs ahead of itself and doubles back multiple times – biography grants the
space for a more nuanced and less chronologically driven narrative, as well as
a greater focus on thematic concerns. The theme of (yamato) tamashii,
“spiritedness,” or perhaps more precisely here “brashness” or “boldness,”
has been remarked upon often. Kaneie refuses to abandon his seemingly

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haunted villa; Michinaga is undaunted when the sovereign challenges him to

visit an eerie spot on the palace grounds. When his sister, consort to the
crown prince, is accused of having an affair with another man, Michinaga
confronts her by squeezing her nipple to prove that it is heavy with milk, the
result of impregnation by her lover. Like Eiga monogatari, such portrayals are
revealing of the personalities of individuals, but the explicit thematization of
the Fujiwaras’ competitiveness with their rivals is an important deviation
from the earlier work.
Perhaps more noteworthy in creating equivocal portraits in Ōkagami is
the presence of more than one narrator in the text. Shigeki and the
attendant become active interlocutors later in the biographies of the
Fujiwara, where they several times contradict or expand Yotsugi’s story.
For instance, following Yotsugi’s account of Crown Prince Atsuakira’s
abdication – in which the prince’s own desires for freedom motivate his
refusal of the throne – the attendant interjects, “I have heard quite a
different version of the affair. There are some facts I happen to know all
about” (McCullough, 119). He then proceeds to recount a tale casting
Michinaga as a bully who actively forced the young man into retirement,
thereby clearing the way for his grandson, the future sovereign GoIchijō, to
be named crown prince.1 Other corrections, many of them minor but
jarring, are made by Shigeki, the attendant, or the audience, and serve as
a constant reminder to the reader about the fallacies of memory and the
capriciousness of storytelling. The context of the story-in-the-round also
permits the listeners to elicit only tangentially related stories from the old
men, taking them in directions that slow narrative progression and there-
fore dissipate the forcefulness implied in the climactic positioning of
Michinaga’s own biography.
It has been suggested that the ambiguous characterization of authority in
the work represents a reassertion of the role of the ritual and is placatory in
asserting authority and constructing history. The context of performance
then becomes a site where narratives silenced by the constrictions imposed
by the written history can be reclaimed. This resurfacing of the marginalized,
the primacy of spoken voice, and a subsequent reorganizing of the way
history is recorded and received all provide particularly promising entryways
for exploring the development of historical narrative during the eleventh

1
Memorial services for his mother, Seishi, were being held at the Urin’in during the same
time that the enlightenment sermon at which the Ōkagami narrative is set. David Bialock
sees this as indicative of the placatory function of the text – one role it fills is pacification of
the dead who had been victimized by Michinaga (Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories, 158).

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through fourteenth centuries. Increasingly, “histories” became more poly-

phonous and contentious, and they also became less explicitly chronological
and more thematically (and cogently) structured as extended narratives.
These tendencies seem antithetical: polyvocality leads to fragmentation and
a breakdown of the coherent thematic structure we associate with narrative
as it becomes less tied to a rigid chronology. Yet both seem to coexist in
tension in Ōkagami’s simultaneous assertion and irreverent treatment of
authoritative voices as the work weaves its “history.”
These late classical histories provided fertile soil for a variety of narrative
works emerging during the medieval period, following the Hōgen and Heiji
uprisings and the Genpei War of 1180–5, which resulted in the bifurcation of
political authority after the victor of the war, Minamoto no Yoritomo,
established a warrior government in Kamakura theoretically under, but in
many ways in competition with, the imperial authorities in Kyoto.
The first histories to recount these conflicts were two kagami-mono (mirror
histories), works imitative of Ōkagami’s form and voice: Imakagami (The New
Mirror, c. 1174–5) and Mizukagami (The Water Mirror, c. 1185–90), which
together comprise a dynastic history from the mythical past through the
grandeur of Fujiwara Michinaga’s day, and beyond to the Hōgen and Heiji
uprisings. Two medieval works pick up the same narrative thread:
Akitsushima monogatari (A Tale of Akitsushima, 1218) and Masukagami (The
Clear Mirror, post-1333). Azumakagami, a kagami-mono concerning the affairs
of the Kamakura bakufu, departs from Ōkagami’s structure in reverting to an
annalistic form, but nevertheless derives part of its stature from the associa-
tion between kagami-mono and history writing.
As is already apparent, the very idea of the historical record has become
fluid by this period: the borders between kagami and monogatari, murky
from the time of Eiga monogatari and Ōkagami, continued to be unclear, as
indeed was the very form of a kagami. Such blurring of categories is a
hallmark of late classical and medieval historical narrative, and one indicating
an evolving engagement with the roles and meanings of history for contem-
porary audiences. What should a history do, what should it look like, and
what are the best means for conveying it?

Gukanshō
Numerous other works from the late classical period also address such
questions, perhaps most interestingly Gukanshō, which explored the possibi-
lity of a Buddhist (and more broadly religious) framework for historical
narrative. Written by the Tendai Abbot Jien (1155–1225) in 1220, Gukanshō

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was penned just before the Jōkyū uprising shook relations between the court
and the fledgling Kamakura shogunate in 1221. Gukanshō is presented as a
history, divided into seven chapters. The first two trace the reigns from Jinmu
through GoHorikawa, including lists of the ministers and Tendai abbots who
presided during each reign. The chronology is followed by four chapters of
narrative analysis of this history. The opening of this analytical portion
situates the entire work within the context of history-writing as exemplified
by Eiga monogatari and Ōkagami:
I hear that after the beginning of the age of man and the enthronement of
Emperor Jimmu, Japan is to have only one hundred reigns. Now that we are
in the eighty-fourth reign not many more are left. Meanwhile, no one has
written succession tales (yotsugi ga monogatari) for the period after the out-
break of the Hōgen Rebellion (1156). (Brown and Ishida, 19–20)
The final chapter postulates events to come.
Jien’s stated goal is to continue the tradition, which he does by prefacing
his narrative with a tale of succeeding reigns and writing in kana-majiribun, a
style reliant primarily on kana. However, his narrative analysis represents
something new: Gukanshō is a history seeking causes and effects, reaching not
only back in time but also forward, and suggesting ways that the general
degeneration inherent in increasing temporal distance from the age of the
historical Buddha can be at least temporarily staved off through wise
governance.
Gukanshō is clearly influenced by the specific circumstances of its author
and its composition (much as the Hōjōki, its contemporary, was). The times
were tumultuous – the Genpei War rent the social order of the capital, and
Yoritomo’s establishment of his warrior government at Kamakura repre-
sented a new political and social group that needed to be addressed both as a
historical development and as a new factor in daily life. More importantly,
Jien himself was in a unique position vis-à-vis the new order. As a member of
the Kujō branch of the Fujiwara, he was brother of Kujō Kanezane (1149–
1207), who served as regent, chancellor, and head of the Fujiwara clan for the
decade immediately following the Genpei War. The recommendation for
Kanezane’s chancellorship came from the shogun Minamoto Yoritomo, as
did Jien’s nomination for the position of Tendai Abbot. When Gukanshō was
written, another Kujō, the child Yoritsune, had been adopted into the
Minamoto clan in the anticipation of naming him shogun – Yoritomo’s
own heirs lasted but a generation. Jien and his Kujō kinsmen were thus
connected to the central court, through Kanezane’s position and their

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hereditary role there, and to the new military government in Kamakura,

through Yoritomo’s endorsements and the young Yoritsune. Relations
between court and shogunate were shaky, which placed Jien in the equally
tenuous position from which Gukanshō was written.
Jien analyzes past events and makes recommendations and predictions
about the future. Speaking as the highest-ranking Buddhist cleric of his day,
he sees his world as a manifestation of Buddhist truth: society moves further
into chaos as the age of the historical Buddha recedes further into the past.
Yet Gukanshō is fundamentally a record of the secular realm, the progression
of generations of sovereigns whose governance relies heavily on the mandate
of the ancestral deities (kami) of the royal house. It is, moreover, a justifica-
tion for Fujiwara domination of the highest ministerial positions. Jien in fact
rationalizes several acts of Fujiwara aggrandizement of power (including the
assassination of Soga Iruka and the banishment of Sugawara Michizane) as
meritorious acts enhancing the righteousness of the throne. Finally, it is an
attempt to explain the emergence of the Minamoto and the establishment of
the office of shogun.
Perhaps because of the divergent threads tied together in Gukanshō, Jien’s
work mobilizes an eclectic mix of modes and styles for conveying its argu-
ment. His assertions about the good embodied in the self-aggrandizing acts of
his relatives and patrons seem immediately contradictory to the idea framing
the work: mappō – the belief that the world had entered the latter days of
Buddhist law. In a more orthodox Buddhist interpretation, the social and
political upheaval of each ensuing age exposes the inexorable movement
toward disintegration; the acts of men in power reveal rather than delay this
progression. Jien’s goal is to reconcile his personal situation and history with
Buddhist conceptualizations of the passage of time, which he seeks to
accomplish by restructuring the relationship between the key concepts of
buppō (Buddhist law) and ōhō (royal law), and defining the role of his family as
central to maintaining it.
Jien asserts that buppō and ōhō must be working harmoniously to ensure
stability in the realm. Within this framework, he is concerned with “princi-
ples” (dōri) – early readers in fact referred to Gukanshō as a “Tale of Principles”
(dōri no monogatari) – which consist of those which work toward deteriora-
tion, and those which ameliorate deterioration, if only temporarily.
Buddhism and kami worship are woven together in this model. Jien outlines
the decline of society in his seven periods of decay, but sees the Japanese state
as a manifestation of the will of ancestral deities that can hinder the speed at
which the world disintegrates. This can only be achieved through the efforts

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of men of talent striking a balance between Buddhist and non-Buddhist

principles working toward good.2
Gukanshō looks back to the succession tales in its intense interest in the
Fujiwara scions who served former rulers as ministers. Its genealogies stress
the role of the Fujiwara in assuring the health of the realm. But by ranking the
Tendai Abbots alongside ministers, Jien simultaneously underscores the
importance of the (Tendai) Buddhist establishment and the vital connection
between secular and sacred law.
Jien’s primary concern in the narrative section of Gukanshō is the future:
what can be done to overcome the current state of affairs (including the
appointment of a non-Kujō regent)? His conclusion is Fujiwara, and specifi-
cally Kujō, domination of politics. He bases his judgment on historical
precedent – times of Fujiwara domination, by his reckoning, had a positive
effect on governance. In his emphasis on a future witnessing the rejoining of
state control by the Kujō, he aspires to the sort of closure we attribute to the
“history.” In contrast to other histories, Gukanshō perhaps most consciously
and directly grapples with the question of how one records the past and what
historical records should contain.
In form and content, Gukanshō reveals its deep concern with justifying the
author’s claims. While much of his interpretation relies on Buddhist thought,
he also depends on other indicators, most prominently precedents. He cites
both continental and domestic examples of good and bad past situations, and
he looks to the Nihon shoki in particular as he searches for originary Japanese
examples by which his times might be judged. As we see here, the first of the
National Histories continued to be a vital source for thinking about the present
throughout the medieval period.
Dream visions that can be interpreted as meaningful communications
from the deities or other spirits represent another important authoritative
source for Jien’s analysis. His interpretation of both past events and prophetic
dreams alludes to one of the work’s deeper concerns: how should capable
men interpret the world around them? Although such concerns are not
absent in the works discussed earlier, in Gukanshō they take on more ominous
meaning as political and social structures become less predictable.
The form of the Gukanshō reflects the author’s engagement with this
complex of concerns. It resembles continental histories in its critique of rulers
and ministers, yet it is premised on the sanctity of the royal line. It is written

2
Osumi, “Gukanshō,” in Nihon koten bungaku daijiten, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1984), 273.

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in kana and thus comprehensible to a wide audience, yet it expects to be

understood fully only by a small subset of its readership. The analytical
section is episodic, and the episodes vary in style from short, expository
narratives and interpretations of dream visions to dialogues and lists, char-
acteristics associated with zuihitsu (essay-like writings). This kind of produc-
tive interaction among styles, forms, and thematic concerns is a hallmark of
works of this period and proved profoundly influential in the creation of the
hybrid narrative genres that would emerge in the following centuries.

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 20
Heian popular songs: imayō and Ryōjin
hishō
ivo smits

Partly because of the paucity of texts that speak directly with voices outside
court circles, it is difficult to grasp what other literary traditions existed in
Heian Japan, although it is clear that song (kayō) was everywhere. A glimpse
of such literature was provided by the rediscovery in 1911 of a collection
of songs long thought lost. All belong to a popular genre known as
imayō (“modern-style” songs), which flourished throughout the eleventh to
thirteenth centuries and encompasses a wide range of songs performed
mostly by miko (shrine maidens), Heian courtesans working the waterfront
known as asobi or asobime, itinerant female entertainers called kugutsu (pup-
peteers), and also the so-called shirabyōshi (“white beat” singers) of the
Kamakura period. This incomplete collection, Ryōjin hishō (Secret
Selections of [Songs to make] the Dust on the Rafters [Dance], 1179), is part
of what must have been a truly substantial record in twenty books of these
women’s repertoire and is accompanied by the Ryōjin hisho kudenshū
(Collected Oral Transmissions), all compiled by the retired monarch
GoShirakawa (1127–92, r. 1155–8), who not only collected songs performed
by women on the margins of society, but even became a disciple of one of
these performers. GoShirakawa was actually criticized considerably for what
many viewed as an unseemly involvement in an art that was supposed to be
miles removed from formal court culture. Nevertheless, he was not alone in
his royal patronage: imayō were performed at court banquets, and his
mother, empress Taikenmon’in Shōshi (var. Tamako, 1101–45), also seems
to have been a patron of imayō singing. While he earned a reputation among
his political opponents as a difficult and dull-witted man (“the biggest goblin
[tengū] in Japan,” the warrior ruler Minamoto no Yoritomo [1147–99] report-
edly called him), GoShirakawa emerges from the Collected Oral Transmissions
as someone with genuinely wistful memories of his asobi teacher and a
passionate dedication to imayō, intent on elevating its status to that of

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respectable waka. It is no coincidence that as a model he invokes the

influential waka treatise Toshiyori zuinō (Toshiyori’s Poetics, c. 1115). The
text also makes clear that a good number of lower-ranking courtiers, some
with formidable reputations as waka poets, were involved in the monarch’s
pursuit of popular song.
Scholars writing on the subject tend to fall into two groups: those who
argue that the female performers were marginalized and exploited, and those
who maintain that they were fully integrated into society. Since the back-
ground of these performers varied in the extreme, from courtiers’ daughters
to anonymous prostitutes, it is difficult to arrive at conclusive statements
about their position in late Heian and early Kamakura society.
The term “imayō” appears already at the end of the tenth century in
Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book), when Sei Shōnagon (d. early eleventh
century) notes: “Imayō are long and have unusual melodies.” The term
denotes both a wide rubric of popular song, which could even include regular
waka, and a specific type of song, only ten of which are extant in Ryōjin hishō.
In the narrow sense, imayō proper knows a limited set of prosodic possibi-
lities, often in the form of a quatrain, that follow an alternation of eight (or
seven) and four (or five) syllables. The three main genres that survive in
Ryōjin hishō are hōmon uta (Buddhist song), shiku no kamiuta (deity song
quatrains), and niku no kamiuta (deity song couplets). Hōmon uta as a rule
consist of four hemistichs (ku), each of which has a 7–5 or 8–5 syllabic count.
The niku no kamiuta tend to adhere to a 7–5 syllabic structure. Shiku no
kamiuta are more irregular and have unconventional meter schemes, such as
the following:

kaze ni nabiku mono Things that sway in the breeze:

matsu no kozuwe no takaki eda high pine branches,
take no kozuwe to ka and topmost bamboo leaves;
umi ni ho kakete hashiru fune ships running on the seas with sails raised high;
sora ni ha ukigumo in the sky, the drifing clouds;
nobe ni ha hanasusuki in the fields, spiked pampass grass.
(Ryōjin hishō 373, trans. Yung-Hee Kim)

Imayō were “modern” or “fashionable” (imamekashi) in contrast to the

older forms of song, but especially so in their performance. In the broad
sense, “imayō” was a tag name that could cover song categories that were
actually quite old, such as kagura (deity music), saibara (horse-readying
music), or fuzoku (folk songs), but performed in the “new style”; as such,
imayō was distinctly different from performances of, for example, saibara in

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the repertoire of gagaku court music. Diverse in form as well as content and
tonality, and in fact also comprising regular court poems (waka), imayō as a
song genre seem to have been sung to melodies and rhythms that clearly set
them apart from waka declamation. Like waka, they could at times be sung
without the accompaniment of instruments, but most likely had a faster
tempo. Yet imayō most often seem to have been sung to the accompaniment
of an instrument, usually a hand-drum, but occasionally also a lute (biwa),
small flute (hichiriki), or even mouth organ (shō). It has been suggested that
certain imayō had close links with wasan, Buddhist hymns that share several
formal characteristics with them.
This link is suggested by the category hōmon uta in Ryōjin hishō. Since
Ryōjin hishō is not intact, however, the heavy emphasis on religious song, be
it Buddhist, Shinto, or of syncretist nature, in what remains of the anthology
is not necessarily the complete picture. The extant table of contents for Book
One of Ryōjin hishō gives categories of song quite close to those of formal
waka anthologies. In fact, within the two extant categories of “deity songs,”
many lyrics deal with the topic of love and yearning. Whatever the theme of
an imayō, the majority of songs take their cues from the lives of the Heian
lower classes.
The second half of the twelfth century saw the rise of a new type of female
performer, the shirabyōshi. The term at first denoted only a type of song;
later it came to refer also to its singers. As with the kugutsu, there seem to
have been male shirabyōshi as well before the category became exclusively
female. The chief novelty was that these women not only sung but also
danced and did so dressed up in a courtier’s cap (eboshi) and trousers; hence
their performance was known also as “male dance” (otokomai). This in no
way prevented shirabyōshi from becoming increasingly popular at both the
imperial court and especially among warriors’ circles throughout the thir-
teenth century. A famous case is that of Shizuka Gozen (“Lady” Shizuka),
the beloved dancer and companion of warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune
(1159–89). The increasing idealization of shirabyōshi and other courtesans,
many of them growing into legendary figures, resulted in a large body of
medieval tales, ballads, and dance dramas (kōwakamai, noh) that centered on
female entertainers.

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 part iii
*

THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

(1185–1600)
 21
Introduction to medieval literature
haruo shirane

The Kamakura period began in 1185 with the establishment of the bakufu, or
military government, in Kamakura, near present-day Tokyo, by Minamoto
Yoritomo, the leader of the Minamoto (Genji) clan that defeated the Taira
(Heike) in 1185. As a result of the Hōgen and Heiji rebellions (1156–9), the
Heike, a military clan, had displaced the Fujiwara, who had dominated the
throne and the court for most of the Heian period. But the Heike elite
emulated the Fujiwara regents, maintaining a deep interest in court culture
and waka. Yoritomo’s establishment of the bakufu created two political
centers, a court government in Kyoto and a military government in the
east, laying the foundation for west–east dual cultures. The Genpei War
between the Genji and the Heike is vividly recounted in the Heike monogatari
(The Tales of the Heike), a medieval literary landmark. After the end of the
war, a struggle broke out between Yoritomo and his younger brother
Yoshitsune, who was killed in 1189 by a general of the Northern Fujiwara
clan in Ōshū (northeast Honshu). Yoritomo in turn destroyed the Fujiwara
forces, ending major domestic armed conflict. In the late medieval and early
modern period, legends surrounding the defeated Yoshitsune became the
foundation for a massive cluster of narrative literature, theater, and dance-
songs, including the Gikeiki (Tale of Yoshitsune).
After Yoritomo’s death, control of the bakufu passed from the Minamoto
to the Hōjō family, led by Hōjō Yoshitoki (1163–1224) and Hōjō Masako
(1157–1225), the wife of Yoritomo and the mother of his successors, including
Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192–1219), the third shogun (r. 1203–19) and a noted
waka poet. A key political turning point in the Kamakura period was the
Jōkyū rebellion in 1221, when the retired emperor GoToba (1180–1239,
r. 1183–98) attempted to restore direct imperial rule from the military by
attacking the Hōjō; he was defeated and exiled to the small and remote island
of Oki. The Jōkyū rebellion revealed the weakness of the nobility and the
emperor and the growing strength of the samurai class, who had effectively

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seized power in the late Heian period. GoToba’s exile to Oki is nostalgically
recounted in Masukagami (The Clear Mirror, 1333–76), a vernacular historical
chronicle.
The Kamakura period ended in 1333 with the defeat of Hōjō Takatoki
(1303–33) and the Hōjō clan by Emperor GoDaigo (1288–1339, r. 1318–39), who
gained considerable power for two years, during the brief Kenmu restoration
(1333–5), before being defeated by another military clan, the Ashikaga.
GoDaigo retreated to Yoshino, south of the capital, and established a
Southern Court, thus beginning the period of rival courts known as the era
of Northern and Southern Courts (Nanbokuchō, 1336–92). The extended
struggle during this period, when the imperial court was split, eventually
ended these attempts and dispersed the nobility, with political power perma-
nently shifting to the military. GoDaigo’s political career and his failed
attempt at imperial restoration is one of the focal points of the Taiheiki
(Chronicle of Great Peace, c. 1370), the most influential chronicle of the late
medieval period.
The Ashikaga clan was based in Kyoto, in a quarter that gave its name to
the Muromachi period (1392–1573), which lasted until the defeat of the
fifteenth shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki (1537–97) by Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) in
1573. The latter half of the Muromachi period, referred to as the Sengoku
(Warring States) period, extends from the beginning of the Ōnin War
(1467–77) to 1573, when Nobunaga destroyed the Ashikaga bakufu and reuni-
fied the country. The Azuchi–Momoyama period (1573–98) refers to the short
period during which two powerful generals, first Nobunaga and then
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, gained national power before the victory of
Tokugawa Ieyasu at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, traditionally treated as
the end of the medieval period.
During the early medieval period the samurai were drawn to aristocratic
and court culture of the capital, as the Heike had been. Although there were
very few samurai waka poets during the Heian period, their number steadily
increased during the medieval period. The most prominent was Minamoto
no Sanetomo, who took an interest in Man’yōshū-style poetry. In the late
medieval period, scholars and poets of samurai origin such as Imagawa
Ryōshun (1326–1420?), Tō no Tsuneyori (1401–84?), and Hosokawa Yūsai
became prominent, and a number of renga (linked verse) masters were of
samurai origin. More important, the warriors became the subject of literature
and performance, particularly in gunki-mono (military narratives) such as The
Tales of the Heike, which were organized chronologically (around battles and
wars) and focused on the lives and families of samurai. Relatively few samurai

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actually contributed to the production of these chronicles, however. More

often, the military chronicles were the work of former aristocrats turned
Buddhist priests, who gave narratives like The Tales of the Heike a heavily
Buddhistic and aristocratic coloring. In the late medieval period, both noh
drama and kōwakamai (ballad drama) were patronized by powerful samurai,
but except for the founder of kōwakamai, Momonoi Naoaki (aka
Kōwakamaru, 1393–1470), a scion of a warrior family whose presence gave
this dramatic form a samurai flavor, warriors themselves were not the play-
wrights. Instead, they became the key audience and patrons.
One of the main characteristics of medieval literature is that much of it was
produced by groups rather than by individuals, most obviously in military
chronicles like The Tales of the Heike and the Taiheiki. The same is particularly
true of popular medieval genres such as kyōgen (comic drama), setsuwa
(anecdotal literature), otogi-zōshi (Muromachi tales), and sekkyō-bushi.
Almost all these works were composed anonymously, or were transmitted
semi-orally in various media, from picture scrolls to theater. This group
tendency is found even in high genres such as renga (classical linked verse),
which became popular from the fourteenth century and was composed by
multiple poets working together. Whereas Heian court literature was a
product of aristocrats working in the privacy of their homes or at court
functions, military chronicles like The Tales of the Heike and later fictional
narratives such as otogi-zōshi and sekkyō-bushi were often recited on the
road, with storytellers traveling from place to place, attracting a wider and
more plebeian audience.
In the medieval period the continuity of the house, or family (ie) – whether
a warrior clan, waka lineage, or kyōgen actor’s guild – became paramount.
This is evident in the nanori (often elaborate recitations of the family lineage)
of warriors on the battlefield. For poetry, scholarship, and performance arts,
the preservation of the house and the transmission of learning from one
generation to the next took precedence. This was the safest way to preserve
learning and frequently led to family-based traditions of secret teachings
(denju) and strong master–disciple relationships. The Kokin denju, secret
teachings of the Kokinshū, in which knowledge and interpretations of the
Kokinshū were passed from master to disciple, are emblematic of this dis-
tinctive aspect of medieval scholarship and learning.
Even while their political and economic status declined, the aristocracy
retained prestige as the custodians of high culture, and the long tradition of
court literature continued to flourish. Indeed, the first thirty or forty years of
the Kamakura period, until the Jōkyū rebellion in 1221, represent one of the

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peaks of aristocratic literature. Some of the greatest waka anthologies –

beginning with the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern
Poems, c. 1205–21), often considered the finest of the twenty-one imperial
anthologies – were compiled at this time. A plethora of poetic treatises, such
as Fujiwara Shunzei’s Korai fūteishō (Collection of Poetic Styles from the Past,
c. 1197–1201) and Fujiwara Teika’s Eiga no taigai (Essentials of Poetic
Composition, c. 1222), were written during the early decades of the
Kamakura period. In fact, more monogatari (tales) were written during the
early medieval period than in the Heian period, although many such works
were imitative, drawing heavily on The Tale of Genji, which had become a
model for literary and poetic composition. It was not until the Muromachi
period that the monogatari received new stimulus from commoner and
regional culture, taking the form of what are now called otogi-zōshi, or
Muromachi tales, which combined the narrative structures of the classical
tales with those of the more concise setsuwa (anecdotal literature) and often
appeared in emaki (picture scroll) format, thereby appealing to wider
audiences.
Aristocratic literature in the medieval period was characterized by strong
nostalgia for the Heian past and an emphasis on preserving court traditions.
Indeed, literary production was the only means for many aristocrats to make
a living, and extensive attention was paid to collating, annotating, and
commenting on earlier texts. Two great literary figures of the late
Muromachi period were Shōtetsu (1381–1459), a prolific and innovative poet
who is regarded as one of the last distinguished exponents of classical waka,
and the renga master Sōgi (1421–1502), of uncertain origins, who wrote
influential treatises on renga and numerous commentaries on the classics.
Such scholarship tended to focus on Heian aristocratic texts like the Kokinshū,
The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji, which became the three most heavily
annotated texts. Commentaries on such works were motivated by the fact
that Japanese poetry, specifically waka and renga, the two most authoritative
literary genres, required knowledge of the Heian classics. Commentary in
fact was the primary form of secular and clerical scholarship in this period.
Buddhist writings in the Heian period, such as the Nihon ryōiki (Record of
Miraculous Events in Japan) and the Ōjōyōshū (Essentials of Salvation, c. 984–
5), were almost always written in Literary Sinitic. In the Kamakura period,
however, the priest-intellectuals of the new Buddhist sects also wrote in kana,
producing hōgo, or vernacular Buddhist literature, which could reach out to a
broader audience. Buddhist leaders like Shinran and Ippen also wrote wasan,
Buddhist hymns, which made their teachings easily available for wide

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dissemination. Equally important was Zen Buddhism, introduced to Japan by

Dōgen (1200–53) and others, which resulted in the so-called literature of the
Five Mountains (Gozan bungaku), writings in Chinese by Zen priests from the
late thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with which Ikkyū (1394–1481) was
associated. The bakufu invited Zen leaders to Kamakura, and under its
patronage Zen priests imported texts and utensils from Song and Yuan
China. Zen Buddhism and Song culture influenced such art forms as dry
stone gardens (karesansui), monochromatic ink painting, kanshi (Chinese
poetry), and tea ceremony, creating a new culture distinct from that estab-
lished by the Heian court aristocrats.
Setsuwa (anecdotal literature) were collected from as early as the Nara
period and appeared in the late Heian period in the massive Konjaku mono-
gatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, c. 1120), but it was in the Kamakura
period that most of the extant setsuwa collections were edited. A related
genre, called the engi-mono (stories of divine origins), which describe the
origins and miraculous benefits of the god or Buddha worshiped by a specific
temple or shrine complex, also gradually came to the fore. Engi-mono were
produced by priests or shrine officials to record, embellish, or reinvent the
history of their temple or shrine. Many of them were presented as illustrated
scrolls (emaki-mono) so that they could be seen as well as heard. A sekkyō
(sermon-ballad) tradition emerged in which priests narrated or chanted
Buddhist teachings or engi-mono to musical accompaniment. In the late
medieval period this tradition was consolidated as sekkyō-bushi (ballads sung
to the beat of the sasara, a percussive instrument), performed by commoner
storytellers. This genre became the basis of sekkyō jōruri (ballads sung to
shamisen accompaniment), which eventually evolved into jōruri (puppet
theater) in the Tokugawa period. Monogatari sō (Buddhist priest-storytellers)
also became specialists in narrating military chronicles like the Taiheiki
(Chronicle of Great Peace).
Buddhist thought permeates almost all genres of medieval literature: from
waka to renga, military chronicles, setsuwa, zuihitsu (essays), noh drama,
otogi-zōshi, and sekkyō-bushi. The role of literature in Buddhism, however,
was controversial. On the one hand, it was dismissed as kyōgen kigyo (later
kyōgen kigo, wild words and decorated phrases); literature and its production
were thought to be illusory and even an impediment to salvation, encoura-
ging worldly attachments. At the same time, it could be rationalized as hōben,
an expedient means of teaching the Buddhist law and leading readers (or
listeners) to insight and, ultimately, enlightenment.

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The Muromachi bakufu came of age with the third shogun, Ashikaga
Yoshimitsu (1358–1408, r. 1368–94), who unified the Southern and Northern
imperial courts. A cultural efflorescence under Yoshimitsu and his son
Yoshimochi, the fourth shogun (r. 1394–1423), is referred to as Kitayama
culture (named after the retreat that Yoshimitsu built north of the capital).
In the Muromachi period both noh and kyōgen matured into major genres,
particularly under the leadership of Zeami, whose patron was Yoshimitsu.
Another notable period of cultural activity was the so-called Higashiyama
period, in the later half of the fifteenth century, primarily during the rule of
Ashikaga Yoshimasa (r. 1449–73, 1436–90), the eighth shogun. In 1483 he built a
retreat at Higashiyama (the Ginkaku-ji, or Silver Pavilion), where he led an
elegant life and supported noh drama, tea ceremony, flower arrangement,
renga, and landscape gardening. Higashiyama culture is noted for its fusion of
warrior, aristocratic, and Zen elements, particularly the notions of wabi and
sabi, which found beauty and depth in minimalist, seemingly impoverished,
material.
The origins of Muromachi noh drama were in sarugaku troupes associated
with shrines and temples (such as the Kasuga Shrine) in Ōmi and Yamato
provinces. The actors belonged to groups attached to shōen (private estate)
owners of large temples and shrines in the Kinai region. During the Northern
and Southern Courts period, when noh and kyōgen matured, Kan’ami and
Zeami, the founders of noh drama as we know it today, were patronized by
the Ashikaga shogunal family, situated in the capital. At this time, noh, which
had popular roots in dengaku (music of the rice fields), began to reflect Heian
court culture and developed the aesthetics of yūgen (mystery and depth),
which included allusions and evocations of the classical past. Characteristic of
this phase of noh were the kazura-mono (woman’s plays), including plays
about characters from The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji. Noh drama also
established a major subgenre of “warrior” plays, commemorating in parti-
cular the heroes of the Genpei Wars.
As travel increased for both aristocrats and commoners, the “arts” of the
roadside emerged. Various religious groups – such as Kōya hijiri (monks from
Mount Kōya), kanjin hijiri (monks soliciting donations for temple building),
and bikuni (nuns) – also traveled, as did biwa hōshi (lute-playing minstrels),
etoki (picture-storytellers), noh actors, kyōgen players, and tekugutsu (puppet-
eers). Renga masters, who often were half layperson and half priest, also
traveled to compose with different groups throughout the country and to
give lessons on the Japanese classics. The culture of the capital was thus
carried to the provinces while the culture of the provinces was brought to the

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capital, giving new life to both. The spread of court culture outside the capital
increased dramatically during the Warring States period (1467–1573). The
Ōnin War (1467–77), which arose over an inheritance issue involving the
Ashikaga shogun and which pitted daimyō (military lords) from the west
against those in the east, took place mainly in Kyoto and destroyed the city,
leading aristocrats and cultural figures to flee to the provinces and seek the
patronage of wealthy provincial lords.
The interaction of oral and written, aristocratic and commoner, led,
particularly in the late medieval period, to the juxtaposition of the serious
and the comic, elite and popular – what in the Tokugawa period was called ga
(elegant, high) and zoku (low). This dialectic is evident in the relationship of
noh to kyōgen (comic drama, with commoner roots and characters), two very
different genres that were performed side by side, and in the relationship of
renga (classical linked verse) to haikai (popular linked verse), which found
humor (as kyōgen did) in overturning and satirizing authoritative figures.
Last but not least, the late Muromachi period was also an international era. In
1549 the Jesuit order (Societas Jesu, J. Yasokai), which was founded in 1540,
sent missionaries to Japan, and they brought with them Western culture and
produced Japanese versions of such works as Aesop’s Fables.

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Japanese poetic thought, from earliest
times to the thirteenth century
a. e. commons

Facility with the composition of waka (poetry in Japanese), the most presti-
gious premodern genre of writing in Japanese (as opposed to kanbun, Literary
Sinitic), was an essential social skill to be mastered by the elite. Waka existed
at the center of a system of practices and texts that included exchanges,
meetings, competitions, rituals, portraiture, anthologies (both public and
private), and treatises on poetic thought known as karonsho. However,
karon, or poetic thought, generally defined as discourse on waka, is found
not only in treatises but also in other poetry-related texts such as anthology
prefaces and poetry contest judgments, and a treatise itself could take the
form of an anthology or collection of poems.
During the Heian period (794–1185), practitioners of waka attempted to
raise its profile as a literary genre by appropriating or emulating elements of
the practice of the more prestigious kanshi (poetry in Literary Sinitic). These
included poetry meetings, the compilation of chokusenshū, or imperially
commissioned anthologies of poetry, and the composition of poetic treatises.
The earliest expressions of karon are the most heavily dependent on Chinese
models; later karon moves toward more distinctively Japanese concepts of
poetry and poetics. Even as karon developed away from Chinese models,
however, the effects of continental modes of thought remained, evident in
the increasingly religious tone of poetic thought in the late twelfth century
under the growing influence of Buddhist discourse.
Heian and early medieval karon generally has a writerly focus, a tendency
to deal with the concrete over the abstract, with great attention paid to the
intricacies of topic selection, diction, meter, and various rhetorical techni-
ques. The advice given may be extremely precise, and the text may take the
form of collections of exemplary poems to provide specific models for the
readers’ own compositions. The social practices surrounding waka contrib-
uted not only to the formation of karon but also to its preservation: the

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twelfth century saw the beginnings of the privatization of poetic knowledge

with the formation of poetic schools or houses (kadōke), each with its own
body of exclusive poetic knowledge. These houses produced and carefully
preserved their cultural capital in various forms, including anthologies,
commentaries, and treatises that were passed down within the house over
many centuries.
Waka, which by the Heian period consisted almost exclusively of the
thirty-one-syllable poems also known as tanka (literally, “short poem”), are
primarily lyrical in orientation, and a central concern of much karon is the
need for poets to strike a balance between content and form, between an
idealized directness of emotional expression and skilfully wrought poetic
language intended to maximize the text’s expressive possibilities. The aes-
thetic preferences expressed in karon tend toward the elegant and under-
stated, with an increasing emphasis being placed on the importance of
suggestion and implication rather than explicit statement. The preferred
style of waka grew increasingly intertextual during the Heian period, and
by the twelfth century the words and images used in poetry were embedded
in a dense web of connotative meanings based on their use in earlier waka. A
thorough knowledge of the poetic canon was thus a prerequisite for success-
ful composition, and karon from this time not only give examples of famous
or admirable past poems but also explain in some detail how aspiring poets
should make allusive reference to such earlier works in their own.

Kakyō hyōshiki (A Formulary for Verse Based on the

Canons of Poetry, 772)
Dating from the late Nara period (710–94), Fujiwara no Hamanari’s (724–90)
Kakyō hyōshiki is regarded as the oldest extant karonsho. Written in kanbun, it
is heavily indebted to Chinese poetic theory, particularly that of the Six
Dynasties period (222–589). The author attempts to adapt Chinese concepts
such as “poetic illnesses,” largely concerned with issues of rhyme and tone, to
Japanese poetry. Hamanari’s insistence on the importance of the aural
qualities of waka was not something widely shared by later authors of
karon. However, the opening passage of Kakyō hyōshiki is significant for its
introduction into Japanese poetic discourse of two particular elements of
Chinese poetic thought, namely the concept of poetry as being rooted in
emotion and the paradigm of the “six modes” of poetry. Both of these are
adapted from the so-called Great Preface to the Shijing (Classic of Poetry,

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c. 600 BCE), and both would be more famously and influentially elaborated
upon in the prefaces to the Kokin wakashū more than a century later.

Kokin wakashū (Collection of Ancient and Modern

Poems, c. 905–14)
The Kokin wakashū, also known as the Kokinshū, was the first anthology of
Japanese poetry to be compiled by imperial commission. The ninth century,
sometimes known today as a “dark age” of waka due to the overwhelming
interest taken in kanshi during that time, had seen the compilation of three
imperially commissioned kanshi anthologies, and when interest in Japanese
poetry revived in the early tenth century the idea of the imperial anthology
was applied to waka as well. Since an imperial anthology is, among other
things, a public record of the poetic accomplishments of the reign of the
emperor who commissioned it, the Kokinshū is particularly significant as the
first official document to be written in the Japanese vernacular rather than
kanbun. The Kokinshū contains approximately 1,100 poems in twenty
volumes, but in terms of karon its primary importance lies in its two prefaces,
one in kanbun and one in the vernacular. The Japanese Preface (Kanajo), by
the chief compiler of the Kokinshū, Ki no Tsurayuki (d. c. 945), is the first piece
of extended prose writing in Japanese on the subject of waka. Its famous
opening paragraph established what would become the orthodox view of the
“affective-expressive” character of Japanese poetry:
The songs of Japan take the human heart as their seed and flourish as myriad
leaves of words. As long as they are alive to this world, the cares and deeds of
men and women are endless, so they speak of things they hear and see,
giving words to the feelings in their hearts. Hearing the cries of the warbler
among the blossoms or the calls of the frog that lives in the waters, how can
we doubt that every living creature sings its song? Not using force, it moves
heaven and earth, makes even the unseen spirits and gods feel pity, smoothes
the bonds between man and woman, and consoles the hearts of fierce
warriors – such a thing is poetry. (trans. L. Cook)1

Tsurayuki stresses the emotional content of poetry (uta, poem/song) and its
spontaneity and universality. The concept of poetry as originating in the
poet’s feelings is drawn from the Shijing, and this idealized view of waka as
spontaneous and authentic emotional expression was enormously influential,
1
Haruo Shirane, Traditional Japanese Literature (New York, Columbia University Press,
2007), 148–9.

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 Japanese poetic thought, from earliest times to the thirteenth century

adhered to by waka poets as dogma even when belied by a poem’s intricately

crafted language or fictional setting. In his description of the pragmatic effects
of poetry Tsurayuki draws on the same passage from the Shijing preface that
Hamanari did earlier, but translates and adapts it into Japanese. The high
regard in which later poets and writers held the Kokinshū Kanajo made it by
far the most important and influential route by which these ideas from
Chinese sources made their way into Japanese poetic discourse.
Tsurayuki goes on to describe the divine origins of waka, crediting the first
thirty-one-syllable poem to the deity Susano-o, and discusses Japanese poetry
in terms of the “six modes” (rikugi) of poetry derived from the Shijing. He
then bemoans the current, degenerate state of waka and describes an idea-
lized past when Japanese poetry flourished even at the highest levels of
society. Tsurayuki then offers critiques of well-known recent (ninth-century)
poets, in the course of which he employs the critical terms kokoro
(heart/mind) and kotoba (words) to describe the (emotional) content and
diction, respectively, of their poems, setting in place a critical paradigm that
became the foundation of many later karon works. The next section of the
preface describes the commissioning of the Kokinshū, whereby its editors
were charged with the task of collecting poems from earlier and contempor-
ary times – giving the anthology its title – and the preface finishes with an
expression of the compilers’ fervent hope that Japanese poetry endure
henceforth. The Kokinshū was instrumental in bringing waka discourse
back into the public sphere, and its Kanajo came to be canonized as the
seminal text of Japanese poetic thought, so much so that it is almost impos-
sible to overstate the extent of its influence on later karon.

Shinsen zuinō (Newly Selected Poetic Essentials,

c. 1001–2) and Waka kuhon (Nine Grades of Japanese
Poetry, c. 1009)
The next major karon text after Tsurayuki’s Kokinshū preface is the Shinsen
zuinō of Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041), the leading waka poet of his age and a
noted polymath whose talents extended to poetry in kanbun and court
music. The son and grandson of regents, and brother to two imperial
consorts, Kintō was a leading cultural figure at court and was active at poetry
contests and other poetry-related events; so dreaded was his displeasure that
an anecdote preserved in the later Toshiyori zuinō recounts the anxiety-driven
death of one mortified poet whose work Kintō criticized in public. Kintō was
a great admirer of Tsurayuki, and the central concern of Shinsen zuinō is the

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relationship between poetic form and content, further developing the critical
framework articulated by Tsurayuki in the Kokinshū Kanajo. Kintō begins
Shinsen zuinō by discussing the structure of tanka; he then indicates that
admirable poems are those that combine deep feeling and pure form, and that
they should also have uncomplicated imagery. In a departure from
Tsurayuki’s approach, however, Kintō goes on to give concrete advice on
poetic composition: he discusses the placement of the emotional content
within the poem, warns against repetitive sounds in a manner reminiscent of
earlier references to “poetic illnesses,” discourages poets from using inelegant
or archaic vocabulary, and advises against making excessive reference to
earlier poems. Kintō also discusses, briefly, the archaic thirty-eight-syllable
sedōka (“repeating-head poem”); the Shinsen zuinō then finishes, at least in its
extant form, with some suggested reading for aspiring poets, recommending,
among other things the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan, 720) and the works of
Tsurayuki. It is thought that the text may have originally included a now-lost
section on the chōka (long poem), although scholarly opinion is divided on
this point. Kintō helpfully illustrates his advice with concrete examples:
Shinsen zuinō includes eighteen poems, chosen to either exemplify poetic
excellence or demonstrate faults to be avoided. It is Shinsen zuinō’s combina-
tion of aesthetic theory and detailed compositional advice that sets it apart
from preceding works on karon.
Kintō’s other major karonsho, Waka kuhon, similarly features issues of
aesthetics (again, couched in terms of form and content) and concrete
examples of admirable poetry. The Kuhon part of the title refers to the nine
grades of rebirth for believers in the Buddha Amida’s Pure Land paradise;
Kintō uses this hierarchy of merit to define nine different classes of poetry,
from the exquisite (Upper Level, Upper) to the charmless (Lower Level,
Lower). The description of each level in Waka kuhon consists of a one-
sentence evaluation of the poems in that class and two example poems.
Kintō’s emphasis on the importance of feeling or content (kokoro) in poems,
evident in Shinsen zuinō, is also clearly visible in Waka kuhon, in which the
poems judged to be on the uppermost level are described, positively, as
having an excess of feeling (amari no kokoro). With this ideal of ineffable poetic
beauty produced by emotional content barely constrained by the poem’s
diction, Kintō anticipates the preference for overtones (yojō) expressed by
poetic theorists in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Kintō also pioneered the genre of the shūkasen (collection of exemplary
poems that could serve as poetic models), and his works include two texts
that can be considered part of that category, along with Waka kuhon:

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Kingyokushū (Collection of Gold and Jewels, c. 1007) and Sanjūrokuninsen

(Selected Thirty-Six People, c. 1009–12), an influential text listing thirty-six
outstanding poets with representative poems. Kintō also compiled Shūishō
(Notes on Gleanings, c. 997), thought to be the basis of the third chokusenshū,
Shūishū (Collection of Gleanings, 1005–7), and the important anthology
Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing; early
eleventh century). He was greatly admired by later poets and theorists,
both for his taste and for his efforts to explicitly and concretely define the
qualities of excellent poetry.

Toshiyori zuinō (Toshiyori’s Poetic Essentials, c. 1115)

The poet Minamoto no Toshiyori (c. 1055–c. 1129) is thought to have com-
pleted his lengthy treatise Toshiyori zuinō about a century after Kintō was at
the height of his influence. Much had changed during that time, as poetic
practice was starting to take on a form now considered characteristically
medieval. The turning point had come with the fourth chokusenshū, the first
to be produced during the insei (government by retired emperors) period
(1086–1185): the Goshūishū (Later Collection of Gleanings) compiled by
Fujiwara no Michitoshi (1047–99) in 1086. Although the poetry collected in
the Goshūishū does reflect changes in taste since Kintō’s time, the text’s
significance in terms of karon lies in the response it provoked, namely, the
first public critique of a chokusenshū, in the form of the Nan Goshūi shō (In
Critique of the Goshūishū, c. 1086) by Toshiyori’s father Minamoto no
Tsunenobu (1016–97). Content-wise, the Nan Goshūi shō consists of eighty-
four poems from Goshūishū that Tsunenobu criticizes as being of poor quality
and unsuitable for inclusion in a chokusenshū. It is the very existence of the
Nan Goshūi shō, however, that can be taken as a sign of the development of
the concept of waka as a serious literary form – in contrast to its role as a
social phenomenon – about which such public debate could occur. This kind
of poetic factionalization and public disagreement over poetry as an art form
can be considered a distinguishing feature of what has been termed the
“medievalization of poetic practice,” along with an increasing tendency
toward the “privatization and exclusivity” of poetic knowledge (Huey, 652).
This time also saw poets starting to regard waka as a “Way” (michi), a skilled
and specialized practice with a spiritual component.
The Toshiyori zuinō is thought to have been written as a poetic primer for
Fujiwara no Taishi (aka Kaya no in, 1095–1155), the daughter of the regent-
chancellor Fujiwara no Tadazane (1078–1162) and later an imperial consort.

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Considerably longer than any preceding karon, the Toshiyori zuinō begins
with a preface in which Toshiyori describes the long history of waka and the
universality of its composition, but then bemoans what he saw as the
staleness of poetic ideas and diction and calls for the creation of a fresh and
novel style (mezurashiki sama). He advertises his own abilities as a poetic
specialist by claiming that he alone is working to preserve the Way of poetry.
The Toshiyori zuinō then covers a broad range of poetry-related topics,
including poetic forms, poetic illnesses, types of poets (from deities to out-
casts), the pragmatic effects of poetry, poetic topics, poetic techniques, the
origins of poetic vocabulary, expressions used in renga (linked verse), and
poetry-related events of earlier times. Stylistically the text is distinguished by
its pioneering use of setsuwa (anecdotes) to impart information, particularly
in the sections on the origins and history of poetic vocabulary and on poetry-
related past events; this use of setsuwa in karon would be emulated by
members of the Rokujō house. The Toshiyori zuinō also includes a section
listing over seventy exemplary poems, providing concrete models of poetic
excellence. The influence of earlier karon is evident in a number of places in
Toshiyori zuinō: for instance, Toshiyori’s account of the history and affective
nature of waka is reminiscent of Tsurayuki’s Kanajo, and many of the
exemplary poems in Toshiyori zuinō are drawn from Kintō’s Shūishō.
Toshiyori echoes Kintō in insisting on the primacy of content (kokoro) in
poetic composition, but where Kintō insists on purity (kiyoge) of form,
Toshiyori places more emphasis on issues of poetic diction, recommending
that the form be fresh or novel (mezurashiki) and that the words be “decora-
tive” (kazari). Through this approach Toshiyori sought dignified beauty in
poetry, and, like Kintō, he valued overtones as an element of poetic quality.
Toshiyori’s innovative approach to poetry is also apparent in his own poetic
compositions, and in the chokusenshū he edited, Kin’yōshū (Collection of
Golden Leaves, 1127), the format of which differed significantly from that of
earlier imperial anthologies.

Ōgishō (Poetic Profundities, c. 1144) and Fukurozōshi

(Book of Folded Pages, c. 1157)
The privatization of poetic knowledge eventually found social expression in
the form of poetic houses, aristocratic families who devoted themselves to
the production, preservation, and transmission from generation to genera-
tion of knowledge of poetic composition, criticism, and precedent. The first
such house to emerge, in the early twelfth century, was the Rokujō house,

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 Japanese poetic thought, from earliest times to the thirteenth century

whose founder, Fujiwara no (Rokujō) Akisue (1055–1123), was an admirer of

Kintō and of Toshiyori. The Rokujō house flourished for almost a century,
and its members produced a number of poetic treatises, commentaries,
anthologies, etc., the best known of which are the Ōgishō and Fukurozōshi
of Fujiwara no (Rokujō) Kiyosuke (1104–77), grandson of Akisue and the
foremost specialist poet of the mid twelfth century. Ōgishō consists of a
preface followed by two volumes, covering such topics as the six modes of
poetry, selected poems from earlier texts with commentary on problematic
points, and explanations of items of poetic vocabulary. Fukurozōshi consists of
two volumes and deals with procedures for organizing poetry meetings and
compiling anthologies, anecdotes about poets, and anecdotes about poetry
contests (uta-awase) and the judgments handed down therein. Their detailed
treatment of individual poems and, in the case of Fukurozōshi, detailed
accounts of the procedures for poetry-related events made both these texts
valuable and influential sources for later poets. The other major Rokujō
writer of poetic criticism was Kenshō (c. 1130–c. 1209), who had been adopted
into the family and became its foremost poetic figure after Kiyosuke’s death.
One of Kenshō’s best-known works is his Roppyakuban chinjō (Complaint
about the Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds, c. 1193), a critique of the
judgments rendered by Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204) in the Roppyakuban
uta-awase (Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds) of 1193. This is reminiscent
of Tsunenobu’s criticism of the Goshūishū over a century earlier, and is a
reflection of the nature of twelfth-century uta-awase, which had become
venues for the serious and minutely detailed – and sometimes acrimonious –
critique of waka and a driving force behind the production of karonsho. The
attention paid by Toshiyori, Kiyosuke, and Kenshō (and, to a lesser extent,
Kintō) to matters of poetic vocabulary and precedent speaks to their concerns
as both participants and judges, arbiters of poetic quality in the crucible of the
uta-awase as waka developed into a literary field.

Korai fūteishō (Collection of Poetic Styles from the

Past, c. 1197–1201)
The other poetic house to emerge in the twelfth century was the Mikohidari
house, whose members attained and held for centuries dominant positions in
the world of waka, their poetic preferences guiding the development of waka
and karon for generation after generation. Some of their descendants – such
as the Reizei house – still pursue waka as a vocation today, preserving the
poetry-related practices of their forebears. The founding figures of the

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Mikohidari house are Fujiwara no Shunzei and his son Teika (1162–1241), the
latter being particularly instrumental in establishing the family as a poetic
lineage. The poetic ideals espoused by Shunzei and Teika, while still con-
cerned with issues of form and content, and while echoing earlier preferences
for overtones, developed in distinctive directions and played a large role in
forming the style of poetry found in the eighth chokusenshū, Shinkokinshū
(New Collection of Old and New Poems, c. 1205) and regarded as character-
istic of the medieval period.
An admirer of Toshiyori and rival of Kiyosuke and the Rokujō poets,
Shunzei rose to become the most admired and influential waka poet, poetic
theorist, and poetry contest judge of the twelfth century. He compiled the
seventh imperial anthology, Senzaishū (Collection of One Thousand Years,
1188), but his most significant critical writing is the Korai fūteishō, thought to
have been compiled by order of Princess Shokushi (d. 1201) and first presented
to her in 1197 before being slightly revised in 1201. The text covers such topics
as the history and changing styles of Japanese poetry, poetic forms, and poetic
illnesses. Korai fūteishō also includes almost two hundred exemplary poems
from the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, c. 759) and almost
four hundred from all chokusenshū extant at that time. Shunzei’s most
important points, however, are made in the preface to Korai fūteishō, and
reflect the growing preference for intertextuality in waka at that time and the
increasing influence of Buddhism on literary discourse.
The origins of Japanese poetry are distant, and the history of its transmission
is long. Ever since the age of the powerful gods, when poetry became the art
of this land, its expressions have encompassed the six modes, and its words
have flourished for myriad generations. In the well-known words of the
Kana Preface to the Kokinshū, the songs of Japan take the human heart as
their seed and flourish as myriad leaves of words. As a result, whether we
seek out the cherry blossoms of spring or view the tinted leaves of autumn, if
we did not have what is called poetry, no one would know the color or the
scent. What would we have for an original heart? (trans. Shirane, 588)
Shunzei’s “original heart” (moto no kokoro) refers to the sensibilities of a
person who has thoroughly internalized the aesthetic preferences of classical
waka and as a result subconsciously sees the world only in terms of conven-
tionalized poetic tropes; such absorption of poetic aesthetics, it was thought,
would naturally enable skillful poetic composition. One developed an “original
heart” through the study of outstanding poems, such as those included in the
Korai fūteishō itself. Although Shunzei acknowledges the emotionally expres-
sive nature of waka, he places the origin of poetic expression within the poetry

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that has been internalized by and is shaping the perceptions of the poet, rather
than presenting poetry as a spontaneous response by the poet to the world, as
Tsurayuki does. This view of waka reflects the preference at the time for highly
intertextual poetry, where skillful allusion to earlier poems was a crucial
element of poetic composition. All acceptable poetic words brought conven-
tional connotative meanings with them from their use in existing poems; these
connotations gave rise to poetic overtones, which in turn produced the
aesthetic quality most prized by Shunzei, yūgen, “mystery and depth.” An
ideal now seen as characteristic of medieval literary genres, yūgen is notor-
iously difficult to define but may be thought of as a quality of richness and
depth of content implied by elegant, understated diction.
In his notion of the “original heart,” Shunzei argues for the indivisibility of
the human heart and the phenomenal world; his argument draws on funda-
mental Buddhist concepts of non-dualism, which he also employs in Korai
fūteishō to suggest a similar equivalence between the Ways of Poetry and
Buddhism. Shunzei also points out parallels between the transmission of the
Buddhist Law and of Japanese poetry through history, theoretical parallels
that were made concrete by his descendants as the poetic houses took
Buddhist rites of transmission as a model for their own transmission of poetic
knowledge from one generation to the next.

Kindai shūka (Superior Poems of Recent Times,

c. 1209), Maigetsushō (Monthly Notes, c. 1219), and Eiga
no taigai (Essentials of Poetic Composition, c. 1222)
Shunzei’s son Teika occupies a uniquely influential position in the history of
classical Japanese literature. The foremost poet of his time, he is the only
person to have played a role in the compilation of two imperial anthologies,
the Shinkokinshū and the Shinchokusenshū (New Imperially Commissioned
Collection, 1235). His descendants dominated the world of waka for centuries,
and his idolization by them and others ensured the ongoing influence of his
ideas. This enduring reverence for Teika is clearly evident in texts such as the
Shōtetsu monogatari (Conversations with Shōtetsu, c. 1448–50), a karonsho that
begins by calling for the damnation of anyone criticizing Teika. Teika was
also a collector and careful copyist of texts whose recensions have played a
significant role in the preservation of a number of literary works today
regarded as canonical.
Like his father, Teika honed his skills as an evaluator of poetic quality
through judging poetry contests. He was a prolific poet and writer on poetry,

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and his three major karonsho are Kindai shūka, Maigetsushō, and Eiga no taigai,
all dating from the early thirteenth century. Kindai shūka consists of a brief
preface and eighty-three exemplary poems intended to serve as models for
composition. In the preface Teika decries the low standard of many con-
temporary poets, and offers advice for improvement, recommending the
careful use of allusion to older poems, particularly from the ninth century, as
a means to enrich one’s waka. The exemplary poems, drawn mainly from
collections from the Kokinshū onwards, are carefully arranged in an inte-
grated sequence using the same categories as chokusenshū, demonstrating
Teika’s skill as an anthologizer of poetry. The text was sent to Minamoto no
Sanetomo (1192–1219), third shōgun and Teika’s poetry pupil.
The Maigetsushō is a letter to one of Teika’s pupils (the identity of whom
remains a subject of scholarly debate) providing Teika’s suggestions for
improvement as a response to the pupil’s monthly submission of a one-
hundred-poem sequence. The most substantial of Teika’s works on karon,
the Maigetsushō covers a broad range of topics, including poetic styles, the
relationship between poetic content and form, composition on poetic topics
(dai), poetic illnesses, and the development of critical judgment. The poetic
style that Teika recommends most highly to his pupil is the style of “profound
feeling” (ushintei). Like yūgen, ushin can be regarded as a fundamental ideal of
medieval karon. As used by Teika, ushin refers to a deep, internalized
understanding of a poem’s topic, coupled with strong emotion. This bears
some relationship to Shunzei’s moto no kokoro; in both cases, the aim was to
achieve a sublimely profound understanding of the poetic topic on which one
was composing, and the result was the development of the poetic style rich in
symbolism and suggestion that is considered characteristic of waka around
the turn of the thirteenth century. In matters of poetic content and form,
Teika insists on the primacy of content but acknowledges that good poetry
strikes a balance between the two. He discusses these concepts in terms of
kokoro and kotoba, but also uses “flowers” (hana) for the diction and “fruit”
(mi) for the content; these terms were used in the Chinese preface to the
Kokinshū, and echo the vegetal motif in the opening of the Japanese preface to
that text.
Revered as a concise crystallization of Teika’s guidelines for poetic com-
position, Eiga no taigai consists of a short preface in kanbun followed by 103
exemplary poems. The opening paragraph deals with the three poetic para-
meters of content (kokoro), diction (kotoba), and style (fūtei), and hints at the
demands and challenges that poets faced in trying to find originality within an
extremely intertextual and precedent-bound genre:

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When it comes to the meaning [kokoro] of poetry, newness must come first.
(One must seek a conception or approach that has yet to be used.) When it
comes to diction [kotoba], one must use old words. (One must not use
anything not found in the Three Collections. The poems of ancient poets
collected in the Shinkokinshū can be used in the same way.) The style [fūtei] of
poetry can be learned from the superior poems of superior poets of the past.
(One should not be concerned about the period but just learn from appro-
priate poems.) (trans. Shirane, 606)
The Three Collections are the first three imperial anthologies, namely Kokinshū,
Gosenshū (Collection of Later Selections, 951), and Shūishū. Poets could make
use of earlier poems by internalizing their conventionalized presentation of
natural and human phenomena; they could also make explicit reference to
earlier poems by quoting parts of them in their own works through the
technique of honkadori (allusive variation). Teika offers concrete advice on
allusive variation, regarding both the amount of material that should be
quoted and the need to compose in a category different from that of the
quoted poem. The final paragraph of the preface is a pithy encapsulation of
Teika’s view of the central roles of intertextuality and precedent in the
neoclassical poetry of the early medieval period, asserting the absolute
necessity for waka poets to also be expert readers of waka:
Poetry has no master. One simply makes the old poems one’s teacher. If one
dyes one’s heart in the old style and learns from the words of one’s
predecessors, who would not be able to learn to compose poetry?
(trans. Shirane, 607)

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 23
Shinkokin wakashū: The New Anthology
of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry
paul s. atkins

The Shinkokin wakashū (or Shinkokinshū, completed in 1221), commissioned

by Retired Emperor GoToba (1180–1239; r. 1183–98) and compiled by a team
including Fujiwara no Teika (also called Sadaie, 1162–1241) under the close
supervision of GoToba, is the eighth imperial collection of waka and the most
influential in the medieval period. An alternate translation of the title, the
“New ‘Kokinshū’,” suggests that GoToba and the compilers of Shinkokinshū
sought simultaneously to emulate the first imperial collection of waka, Kokin
wakashū (Kokinshū, 905–14) and to go beyond what it had accomplished,
potentially even surpassing it.
Shinkokinshū is a collection of nearly two thousand Japanese poems in the
tanka form, thirty-one syllables arranged in syntactic units of 5/7/5/7/7
syllables. Some manuscripts contain 1,978 poems; others, 1,979. The poems
are grouped by topic in twenty scrolls or books (maki), as follows: Spring I
(Haru jō); Spring II (Haru ge); Summer (Natsu); Autumn I (Aki jō); Autumn II
(Aki ge); Winter (Fuyu); Felicitations (Ga); Grief (Shūshō); Parting (Ribetsu);
Travel (Kiryo); Love I (Koi ichi); Love II (Koi ni); Love III (Koi san); Love IV (Koi
yon); Love V (Koi go); Miscellaneous I (Zō jō); Miscellaneous II (Zō chū);
Miscellaneous III (Zō ge); Deities (Jingi); and Buddhism (Shakkyō).
Two prefaces are attached, one in classical Chinese (Manajo) and another
in the vernacular (Kanajo). Both are written in the voice of GoToba, but it is
known that the Chinese preface was drafted by Fujiwara no Chikatsune
(1151–1210), and the Japanese preface prepared by Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
(1169–1206), before they were edited by GoToba. They extol the Way of
Japanese poetry, profess GoToba’s love for the art, acknowledge his shame-
lessness in including so many of his own poems (over thirty), name the
compilers, and describe the process and policy of compilation.
At the time, GoToba was only twenty-one years old, having acceded to the
throne in the middle of the Genpei War and abdicated at the age of eighteen.
Like many of his predecessors, he established an Office of the Retired

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Emperor and set about dominating court politics, which had not been
possible during his reign due to his youth and ritual restrictions on the
movements of sitting emperors. What made GoToba’s experience distinctive
was the presence of the Kamakura shogunate, established by Minamoto no
Yoritomo in 1192, which accelerated the imperial family’s loss of military,
judicial, and economic power. The Shinkokinshū may be regarded as an early
stage in GoToba’s lifelong project of imperial restoration, later continuing in
the construction of a “virtual Japan” through poems and painted screens at
the Saishō Shitennōin chapel, and culminating in and terminating with his
failed attempt to overthrow the shogunate in the Jōkyū rebellion of 1221.
The compilers took great pains not only in choosing which poems to
include, but also in deciding the sequence in which they would appear within
individual books. All of the imperial waka anthologies are organized by topic,
so there is always some sense of pattern, but the degree of care expended on
sequencing in Shinkokinshū is remarkable. In particular, the books of the four
seasons and love respectively exhibit an overall pattern of movement, or
progression, from spring through summer and autumn to winter, and from
the first stirrings of love through stages of intense longing, consummation,
abandonment, despair, and resentment of the former lover. The relationship,
or association, between consecutive poems was also considered. One poem
might follow another because of a shared phrase, or because of the identities
of the authors who wrote them, or because both poems alluded to the same
earlier poem. The elucidation of “association and progression” in the orga-
nization of Shinkokinshū is a major scholarly task that is still ongoing.
Because this collection contains such a large number of poems on diverse
topics from a period that spanned from the eighth-century Man’yōshū to the
time Shinkokinshū was compiled in the early thirteenth century, it is difficult to
describe the content succinctly. Nonetheless, a few broad observations may be
attempted. Previous anthologies included poems in various rarer forms, such
as the chōka (long poem) and sedōka (“repeating-head poem”), but the poems in
Shinkokinshū are metrically homogenous: all are in the thirty-one-syllable tanka
form. In accordance with established precedent, the compilers scrupulously
avoided including any poems that had already appeared in an imperial anthol-
ogy of waka, but they allowed themselves the use of Man’yōshū as a source;
although the latter was not an imperially commissioned anthology, compilers
of previous imperial anthologies had eschewed including poems from it in their
collections. Despite this broad chronological scope, a large proportion of the
poems included in Shinkokinshū were written by the compilers, GoToba, their
contemporaries, and poets of the generation that immediately preceded theirs.

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The ten poets with the largest number of poems in the collection are as
follows, with the number of poems included and their dates of birth and
death (if known): Saigyō, 94 (1118–90); Jien, 92 (1155–1225); Fujiwara no
Yoshitsune, 79 (1169–1206); Fujiwara no Shunzei, 72 (1114–1204); Princess
Shokushi, 49 (d. 1201); Fujiwara no Teika, 46 (1162–1241); Fujiwara no Ietaka,
43 (1158–1237); Jakuren, 35 (c. 1139–1202); Retired Emperor GoToba, 33 (1180–
1239); and Ki no Tsurayuki, 32 (d. c. 945).
With the exception of the last poet, Tsurayuki, all of these poets belonged
to the contemporary period. All of the first nine poets were either compilers
themselves or well known to the compilers as teachers, patrons, relatives, or
friends. Their compositions account for more than a quarter of the entire
anthology. Many of the contemporary poems were originally produced for
large-scale poetic events, such as poetry gatherings or matches. Notable
sources were two events sponsored by GoToba himself, Sengohyakuban uta-
awase (The Poetry Match in Fifteen Hundred Rounds, 1201–3) and the Shōji ni-
nen shodo hyakushu (First Set of Hundred-Poem Sequences in the Second Year
of the Shōji Era, 1200). Other significant contemporary events were the
Roppyakuban uta-awase (The Poetry Match in Six Hundred Rounds, c. 1193–
4), and Omuro gojisshu (Fifty-Poem Sequences at Omuro, 1198), sponsored by
Fujiwara no Yoshitsune and Cloistered Prince Shukaku (1150–1202),
respectively.
Therefore, most discussions of the contents of Shinkokinshū properly focus
on the works of contemporary poets, especially those associated with a new
and relatively innovative style. These poets were connected in various ways
with two central figures: Fujiwara no Shunzei (also called Toshinari), who had
compiled the previous imperial anthology of waka, Senzai wakashū (Collection
of a Thousand Years; also Senzaishū, 1188), by himself, and Shunzei’s son and
heir, Teika, who served as one of the co-compilers of the Shinkokinshū and later
as solo compiler of the next imperial waka anthology, Shinchokusen wakashū
(New Imperial Waka Anthology; also Shinchokusenshū, 1235).
Circumscribed as they are by the precedent and decorum dictated by
imperial anthology status, the poems contained in Shinkokinshū necessarily
form part of a whole with the canon of waka. The major topics are love and
nature. Sinified words are avoided. Violent or vulgar imagery does not appear.
Poems were often written in response to assigned topics (daiei), and the topics
were sometimes relatively complex. A topic or image typically bore a conven-
tional association, or hon’i; cherry blossoms were associated with the ephemer-
ality of life due to the brevity of their blooms; travel was inherently miserable,
because it took one away from one’s beloved in the capital.

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Within these tight constraints, however, the new generation of poets

found ways to innovate. Of the formal and technical characteristics associated
with the Shinkokin style, four seem most worthy of mention: (1) allusion to
earlier poems, or honkadori; (2) ending poems on a noun (nominal termina-
tion, taigen-dome), which is relatively rare in Japanese and produces a sentence
fragment; (3) configuring the poem in two halves of 5/7/5 and 7/7, which
produces a juncture after the third syntactical unit, or line (sanku-gire; often
combined with nominal termination); and (4) a certain quality of obscurity,
opacity, or ellipticality that frustrates quick comprehension and was called in
its time by the pejorative term Daruma-uta (“Bodhidharma poems,” connot-
ing “Zen gibberish.”)
The first quality, allusive variation, may be observed in a poem that alludes
to this verse by the Heian court lady Izumi Shikibu (fl. c. 1000). The precise
topic is unknown, but it is clearly a love poem and it appears among the Love
chapters of the fourth imperial waka anthology, Goshūi wakashū (or
Goshūishū, Later Collection of Gleanings, 1086):
Kurokami no As soon as I lay down,
midare mo shirazu oblivious to the tangles
Uchifuseba of my black hair,
mazu kakiyarishi I longed for the one
hito zo koishiki who caressed it.
The speaker, a woman, lies down to rest, her hair disheveled by a night of
lovemaking – this is the morning after. What first comes to her mind,
prompted by lying in the bed where the two spent passionate hours together,
is her male lover, and the way he tenderly ran her fingers through her hair.
Having had to leave before sunup, he is absent now, and she misses him
greatly.
Now here is a famous waka by Teika and included in Shinkokinshū that
alludes to the earlier poem:
Kakiyarishi Every single strand
sono kurokami no of that black hair
sujigoto ni I once caressed
uchifusu hodo wa appears in my mind
omokage zo tatsu whenever I lie down.
In this poem, the speaker is a man who, for some reason, cannot be with his
beloved. Tired and dejected, he throws himself down on his bed and closes
his eyes to rest, but cannot but see in his mind the image of his beloved, so
clearly recollecting in painful solace the look and feel of her beautiful black

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hair. “Black hair” (kurokami) is a common image in waka poetry, but the
presence of the rarer phrases uchifusu (“lay down”) and especially kakiyarishi
(“caressed”) signal that this is an act of conscious allusion on Teika’s part. By
repeating Izumi’s phrasing, he is not only alluding to her poem, but it is as if
he himself has become her lover, and is responding to her poem, enclosed in a
love letter, with his own poem in his own letter. (It was common for poets
exchanging poems for social purposes to echo each other’s phrasing.) In later
ages, the rules of allusive variation would be fixed, and poets would be
required to change the topic of a poem, limit the number of syllables
borrowed, and avoid alluding to poems of the recent past. In this case, the
topic has not been changed, but the other two rules have been obeyed.
Teika’s poem does not end on a noun, nor does it have a strong syntactical
break. These next two qualities may be observed in a single poem by his
father, Shunzei, which appears in the second Spring chapter of Shinkokinshū.
Its preface says that it was one of five poems composed at the residence of the
regent and prime minister (Yoshitsune).
Mata ya min Will I ever see it again?
Katano no mino no Hunting for cherry blossoms
Sakuragari in the royal meadow at Katano –
hana no yuki chiru dawn in springtime
haru no akebono as flowers of snow fall.
This poem simply presents a vivid and memorable scene, filtered through a
consciousness of impermanence and transience. The speaker, who must have
some connection to the court in order to be present on land reserved for the
use of the imperial family, is looking for especially lovely cherry blossoms in
mid-spring at daybreak. Dawn was closely associated with spring due to the
increasing brevity of the nights, and thereby carries a somewhat romantic
connotation. He wonders whether he will ever visit this place again, and the
identity of the poet lends some poignancy to its inclusion in the collection, as
Shunzei died before Shinkokinshū was completed. The final trope of the
falling blossoms resembling snow is a conventional one.
Due to grammatical differences between classical Japanese and modern
English, it is impossible to completely recreate even the syntax of the original
precisely in this translation, but some general features should be apparent. As
the long dash suggests, there is a strong syntactical break after the third line
(sanku-gire, no. 3 listed above). In fact, there is also a weaker break after the
first line, because the first three lines are actually an inverted sentence, and
the “original” sentence (Katano no mino no sakuragari mata ya min) would have

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ended there. (Inversion and breaking the syntax after the first line are also
conspicuous elements of Shinkokin prosody). The age of the Shinkokinshū
overlapped with the early development of Japanese renga (linked verse), and
there may be some connection between the breaking of waka into two
syllabic units of 5/7/5 and 7/7 and the composition of linked verse, which
is written in alternating units of 5/7/5 and 7/7 syllables.
It might also be clear that the last two lines are not a “complete” sentence per
se, but a fragmentary phrase, a subject without an explicit predicate. The last
line, haru no akebono (“dawn in springtime”) is actually modified by the fourth
line, the relative clause hana no yuki chiru; a more literal translation of the last
two lines might read, “spring dawn during which a flower-like snow falls.”
Although the snow of blossoms is conventional, the configuration of the last
two lines in this way – that is to say, the nominal termination (no. 2 above) – is
not, and distinguishes this poem from the works of earlier centuries.
The toponym Katano leads us to an allusive context. It would have given a
hint to readers that the poet may have been referring to section 82 of Ise
monogatari (The Tales of Ise), a collection of poem-tales associated with the
courtier and poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–80). In it, a prince takes a trip to
his villa at Minase, south of Kyoto, with some members of his entourage, to
hunt with hawks, but instead spends most of his time drinking, appreciating
the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and exchanging poems with his compa-
nions, presumably including Narihira, as two of his poems are cited and he is
mentioned by his office, but not by name. There is no specific poem in that
section that Shunzei seems to be alluding to, so this is not an example of
allusive variation per se, but the simple mention of Katano summons up the
elegant, playful atmosphere of Heian court life that we glimpse in Ise, inviting
us to imagine Shunzei’s speaker as a member of that fortunate entourage, and
greatly expanding the connotative power of this brief verse.
The process by which Shinkokinshū was compiled is relatively well docu-
mented: we even have partial records of which poems were recommended
by which compilers. Before, during, and after the formal compilation process,
numerous poetry gatherings and contests were sponsored by GoToba, and
many of the poems produced at them were incorporated into the anthology.
As for the formal process, GoToba resurrected the Wakadokoro (Poetry
Bureau) in 1201, and appointed eleven courtiers and Buddhist monks to its
staff. This official agency had lay dormant since the mid tenth century, when
it had served as an administrative base for the compilers of Gosen wakashū
(Later Collection of Poems, 951), the second imperial waka anthology. By
reviving the Poetry Bureau, GoToba was laying the groundwork for his own

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imperial anthology, and indeed he issued the official commission a few

months later, to five members of the Bureau: Minamoto no Michitomo
(1171–1227), Fujiwara no Ariie (1155–1216), Teika, Ietaka, Fujiwara no
Masatsune (1170–1221), and the monk Jakuren.
The privilege of serving as a compiler of an imperial waka anthology was a
great honor for which poets vied fiercely. GoToba’s team of compilers
appears to have been assembled with various extraliterary considerations in
mind. In order to be appointed, one’s social status could not be too low
(e.g. Kamo no Chōmei) or too high (e.g. Fujiwara no Yoshitsune). Women
were never permitted to serve. Three of the compilers of the Shinkokinshū –
Teika, Ietaka, and Jakuren – were members of Shunzei’s Mikohidari faction
of poets, which had competed against the rival Rokujō faction in the 1190s for
patronage and prestige. In general, the Rokujō strongly emphasized literary
precedent in their poetry, and even included archaic language from the pages
of the Man’yōshū, while the Mikohidari favored conceptual innovation, and
turned to more approachable narrative texts, such as Genji monogatari (The
Tale of Genji), as an allusive resource. Only one member of the Rokujō
faction, Ariie, was appointed as a compiler, which indicates their failure to
win GoToba’s patronage and meant that relatively few of their poems would
be included. Of the remaining members, Masatsune had been active in poetic
circles in Kamakura before being recalled to the capital by GoToba in 1197; he
was also renowned as a master player of kemari (a footbag game). Michitomo
was the son of a powerful courtier, Minamoto no Michichika (1149–1202),
who had served not only GoToba but his father and grandfather as well.
Michichika had supported the Rokujō poets; one source says that he sought
to join the compilation team himself, but could not serve due to his high
office, so his son was appointed instead. Jakuren, Shunzei’s adopted son, died
not long after the project began, but is named as a compiler.
In 1203, Teika presented GoToba with a list of the poems that the compi-
lers proposed to include in the anthology. GoToba responded a year later
with his revisions, and the process of arranging the poems according to topic
commenced. In 1205, GoToba held a banquet to commemorate the comple-
tion of the Shinkokinshū, exactly three hundred years after the Kokinshū was
presented. But changes continued to be made as more poetry contests and
gatherings were held, and their results included in the new collection. It was
more or less complete by 1208, but the earliest extant clean copy dates from
1216. After being exiled to the island of Oki in 1221, following his failed attempt
to overthrow the Kamakura shogunate, GoToba re-edited Shinkokinshū

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himself, deleting some 360 poems (including all of his own works) and
producing what is now called the Oki version.
Shinkokinshū is a pillar of medieval Japanese aesthetics, and it was the single
most important poetic text of medieval Japan. While building upon
Kokinshū’s legacy of close attention to the four seasons and love,
Shinkokinshū added a distinctively medieval layer of world-weariness that
may be associated with the increased influence of Buddhist thought and
practice in the centuries that separate it from the earlier anthology. With
Kokinshū, Genji monogatari, Ise monogatari, and other earlier texts as common
points of reference, and the assigned-topic method of composition, the
Shinkokinshū poets were able to achieve an allusive depth that was not
possible before their time.
In turn, Shinkokinshū became a touchstone in its own right, as Japanese
readers committed its poems to memory and writers quoted and alluded to
them in their own works. The anthology not only influenced later waka
poets, it also became an important resource for noh playwrights, renga and
haikai poets, and even tea masters. Evaluation of Shinkokinshū by readers
from the early modern period to the present has been largely positive. It has
also been highly regarded as a poetic resource by major modern Japanese
poets, including Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), Tachihara Michizō (1914–39),
and Yosano Akiko (1878–1942).

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 24
Waka in the medieval period: patterns of
practice and patronage
steven d. carter

The legacy of the Shinkokinshū era

During the Shinkokinshū era (completed in 1221), Japanese court poetry –
waka or, more commonly in the parlance of the time, uta – emerged as a
discrete literary field, with its own genres and sub-genres, institutions and
practices, critical vocabulary and textual traditions, along with a sense of
history and ideological purpose. This discourse was not, strictly speaking,
independent, since it was almost exclusively the province of the elite and was
inevitably linked to social rituals and practices, many of which required
poetry. Yet it is clear that court poetry by the early thirteenth century was
regarded as a serious form of artistic endeavor or a semi-religious Way (michi)
and not simply an amusement or polite accomplishment. This Way can
perhaps best be described in terms of three large rubrics – genres, technical
and critical vocabulary, and social practices.

Genres
The basic genre of court poetry after the era of Shinkokinshū would continue
to be the uta, the thirty-one-syllable poetic form that had held the central
position in the literary hierarchy since at least the 800s and would retain its
privileged position into the early modern period. Always a social as well as an
aesthetic form, the uta in the medieval period was typically “aired” if not
actually composed at social gatherings and in that sense was a kind of
performance art. Moreoever, most poems were composed on dai (fixed
topics), response to which required a knowledge of precedent that became
the basis of a social contract uniting participants in a discourse that extended
back in time and out in space to all practitioners of the art.

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Most uta came to public recognition through some kind of anthology or

communal effort, typically supported by elite patrons. Chief among these
were the uta-awase (poem contests), in which poems on the same topics were
paired for judgment, sometimes in a communal setting, sometimes simply on
paper; and the “numbered anthology” (of five, ten, one hundred, etc.) that
brought poems on fixed topics together, often to be presented to a patron or a
shrine as an offering or to the compiler of a larger anthology. Both uta-awase
and poem sequences, in their organization and aesthetic preoccupations,
revealed connections to larger social and discursive realities.
In addition to uta-awase and numbered anthologies, there were various
kinds of anthologies, such as uchigiki, or “private anthologies,” compiled by
the leaders of lineages or coteries after the model of imperial anthologies (for
which they often aspired to provide resources), and shikashū, or collections of
poems by individual poets, put together either by the poets themselves or by
descendants or disciples. In almost all cases, these other kinds of anthologies
mimicked more “public” works in favoring poems on fixed topics and in
organizing their poems into books on the four seasons, love, and miscella-
neous topics.

Technical and critical vocabulary

Most of the jargon used by medieval teachers to instruct their students and by
critics to explicate and evaluate poetic texts came from earlier periods. Still, it
can be argued that it was in the writings of Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204)
and his contemporaries that fundamental analytical terms like sugata (con-
figuration, overall effect), kokoro (feeling, sentiment, idea), and kotoba (lan-
guage, diction, rhetoric), as well a host of more technical terms such as
honkadori (allusive variation) and hon’i (essence, ideal) achieved a firmness
of definition and precision of reference that many of them had not had
before.
Much the same can be said for terminology used by Shunzei and others to
describe desired poetic effects – words like aware (moving, sadly beautiful),
yūgen (mystery and depth, profundity), en (elegant, evocative), yojō (over-
tones), yōen (ethereal), okashi (amusing, attractive), taketakashi (lofty, grand),
and sabitaru (forlorn, withered). Although often employed in rather offhand
ways, usage examples in a variety of texts reveal what sorts of ideals each
term was felt to gesture toward.

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Practices
As noted above, court poetry was almost always produced in a social context
and according to a highly codified set of practices, sometimes differing from
house to house, which prescribed everything from dress and seating arrange-
ments to methods of recording poems on paper, and so on. Men of the poetic
houses were expected to serve as primary resources for such events, which
required them to commit much of the poetic canon to memory and to learn
ritual practices. Again, this was not entirely new: poetry as a field of knowledge
and practice had existed since the earliest days of the Heian court. However, it
was during the Shinkokinshū period that many precedents achieved a kind of
sacral status that they would continue to enjoy into the Edo period. Part of
being a poetic house, in fact, was being able to claim a tradition of such
practices, along with a library of important poetic manuscripts and often secret
teachings on matters involving those practices and other poetic matters.
One final comment rounds out this summary of the practice of poetry in
medieval times, namely, that it was generally believed that good poetry came
from the heart (kokoro), in other words, from an educated and “courtly”
sensibility, rather than merely from the intellect. Learning (sai or saigaku) was
still important, since the authority of the poetic houses in fact depended at
least partly on accumulated knowledge. For the most part, however,
Shunzei’s definition of poetry as a Way of devotion in which one gained
excellence through dedication and training (keiko) under a master would
prevail for the next four centuries and beyond.

The later Teika and the ushin ideal

As the Shinkokinshū period came to an end, the Mikohidari house of Fujiwara
no Teika (1162–1241) – among competing noble lineages – was preeminent
partly because it could claim long traditions of practice as well as scholarship in
a world in which nothing was more important than affiliation with the
legitimizing authority of ancient traditions. Even after the disastrous defeat
of royal forces in the Jōkyū uprising of 1221, the imperial court retained its place
in a robust cultural market, and in that market Teika established an unprece-
dented measure of authority for his lineage. Especially after the appearance of
the ninth imperial collection, Shinchokusenshū (The New Imperial Anthology,
1235), for which he served as sole compiler, he dedicated himself to collecting
and collating literary manuscripts that he felt to be essential to the Japanese
poetic tradition, from Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) to imperial

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collections and personal poetry anthologies. In the process, he amassed a

library for descendants who would follow him as poetry masters to the court.
Although known in his youth as an iconoclast, Teika, in one of his later
essays (Maigetsushō, Monthly Notes, c. 1219), lamented that Shinkokinshū had
sometimes nurtured flowers (hana) at the expense of fruit (mi), i.e. rhetorical
and tonal complexity at the expense of clearly articulated meaning and depth
of feeling. His later commitment was to the overarching ideal of ushin – “deep
feeling” or “sincerity” – which in practice seems to have meant poetry deriving
from his father’s emphasis on “spiritual” concentration and training rather than
mere book-learning and technique. As examples one can offer two poems by
Teika himself, one from Shinkokinshū (no. 1206) and one from Shinchokusenshū
(no. 261), which would be listed as models of ushin by his descendants:
Written as a Love poem
Kaerusa no After his tryst,
mono to ya hito no will he too be looking up –
nagamuramu sad that he must leave?
matsu yo nagara no For me the moon at dawn
ariake no tsuki ends only a night of waiting.
Written for a fifty-poem sequence on “The
Moon,” when the GoKyōgoku Regent was still
serving as Captain of the Left
Akeba mata Day will dawn,
aki no nakaba mo and we will pass beyond
suginubeshi the mid-point of fall.
katabuku tsuki no But will the setting moon
oshiki nomi ka wa be all that we lament?
Both these poems are rhetorically polished but by no means obscure, and
both include clear markers of refined feeling: gentle frustration over a night
spent waiting for someone who has spent the night with another woman and
regret over ever-present signs of approaching old age. Neither in any way
detracts from the basic ideal of courtly elegance, for which Teika wanted his
own work and his imperial anthology to be known.

Continuing patterns of patronage and practice

Shinchokusenshū was solicited by Emperor GoHorikawa (1212–34, r. 1221–32),
and it is undeniable that royals and the nobility were still acting as patrons to

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poets and their institutions in the thirteenth century. But by the late 1200s
poetry was also being produced among the middle classes of the literate, in
the military families and expatriate courtiers of the shogunal capital at
Kamakura, in coteries at the Ise, Kasuga, and Sumiyoshi shrines, and even
in more remote places like the chief temple of the Time Sect in Fujisawa,
Sagami province. The activities of elite poets at the imperial court, especially
those of Teika’s Mikohidari lineage, were therefore just part of the story,
which to be complete would also have to include references to poets such as
the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192–1219), who despite his study under
Teika produced poems of a distinctly direct and realistic style not entirely
reconcilable with his teacher’s values. And even in Kyoto there were chal-
lengers to the Mikohidari authority.
To a remarkable degree, however, the lineages of Teika did retain hege-
monic control over poetic discourse. Teika’s son Tameie (1198–1275) married
the daughter of a wealthy warrior of the Utsunomiya clan himself and thus
had his own contacts in the East Country. To the military elite, rank
mattered. Most aspiring poets of any social standing sought identification
with the Mikohidari house first of all. In this way, many military clans became
patrons, supporting contests, small anthologies, and poetry gatherings, just
like their noble counterparts. They even sponsored anthologies, good exam-
ples being the Tōsen waka rokujō (The Waka Rokujō of the East Country) and
the Shin wakashū (New Waka Collection) both of which were compiled by
poets in the East Country. While showcasing the poets of the eastern sea-
board, these collections were organized like imperial anthologies, followed
courtly traditions in style, and were no doubt intended to become resources
for future imperial projects.
Tameie was not as adventurous as Teika had been in his youth when it
came to his own poetry and his teachings. While admitting his father’s
genius, he concentrated on the basics, inaugurating a tradition that would
continue in poetic discourse throughout the medieval period. For this reason,
his one critical essay, Eiga no ittei (The Foremost Style of Poetic Composition,
c. 1264) reads less like a theoretical treatise than a handbook designed to
introduce students to the fundamentals of composition, a task it accom-
plished so well that it became the most widely used of all primers, while
his poems became even more important than those of his ancestors as models
for instruction. Thus it was to poems such as the following by Tameie himself
from the Shokugosenshū (no. 124), which Tameie presented as sole compiler in
1251, that later generations would look for inspiration:

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On “Blossoms in the Garden,” from a fifty-poem

sequence composed at the home of the Reverend-
Prince Dōjō
Ato taete The footprints are gone
towarenu niwa no from my unvisited garden:
koke no iro mo the color of the moss
wasuru bakari ni all but forgotten now
niwa zo furishiku beneath fallen blossoms.
Poetry in the late Kamakura period remained a kind of performance art, aired
if not composed in communal gatherings where such understated scenes
served as models of decorum, form, and subtle gradation of expression.
Tameie’s critical statements accordingly concentrate on aural effects that
would be appreciated when a poem was vocalized, and on such things as the
treatment of fixed topics, matters of diction and decorum, the authority of
precedent (as articulated in the technique of honkadori and other forms of
intertextual reference), and the importance of constant training in prepara-
tion for public performance and scrutiny. All these features of practice would
have a lasting impact on poetics throughout the rest of the late medieval
period.

Internecine strife and its consequences

Tameie’s chief ambition was to gain for his descendants a secure place in the
poetic culture of the imperial court. Late in life, however, his own situation
was complicated by the support he offered to younger sons by women other
than the mother of his heir, Tameuji (1222–86), which opened the way for
lawsuits and countersuits that eventually would split his family into three
competing lineages – called the Nijō, the Kyōgoku, and the Reizei after the
streets on which they had residences in Kyoto. The resulting infighting would
do much to structure poetic discourse for generations to come.
Tameuji, Tameie’s formal heir and the founder of the Nijō lineage, had an
illustrious career in Kyoto, as did his brother Kyōgoku Tamenori (1227–79)
and Tamenori’s son Tamekane (1254–1332), who found patrons to support
their cause. However, the third son, Reizei Tamesuke (1263–1328), ended up
following his mother, the Nun Abutsu (c. 1222–83), as she sought redress in
the shogunal courts in Kamakura. In this he was not alone, other sons of
Tameie having also settled in Kamakura, where they claimed authority in the
literary field, dispensing “secret teachings” based on authentic knowledge

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handed down from the patriarchs, and in some cases literally concocting new
esoteric teachings and practices. In addition, men of the poetic houses could
count upon being asked to do ritual work at gatherings, as kōshi (“lectors,”
who read poems aloud before the assembled participants), dokushi (“mar-
shals,” who collected poems from participants and acted as supervisor over
the lector), and so on. Custom demanded that such tasks be performed only
by those with specific authority, knowledge, and training, among whom the
competing heirs of the Mikohidari house could claim high standing.
The standard narrative of Japanese court poetry for the rest of the medie-
val period is to a remarkable degree organized around the disputes among
the three Mikohidari lineages: firstly, over property and seniority, which
were complicated by affiliations with disputing imperial lineages, and later
over style and poetics. Accounting for the latter is no easy matter. To a
certain extent, the conflict presents a classic case of one side taking a contrary
position simply in order to make a clear place for itself. While Tameuji
remained a conservative in matters of diction, Tamekane and Tamesuke,
who were natural allies against the senior house, were more liberal; while
Tameuji favored the clear display of a “refined” sensibility through the use of
traditional metaphor and syntax, his younger brothers reacted somewhat
against such strictures. But it is also true that Tamekane was a student of both
traditional aesthetics and Buddhism who deserves credit for developing an
aesthetic of his own that would influence later poets, from Shōtetsu
(1381–1459) to the haikai master Matsuo Bashō (1644–94).
Critics attacked Tamekane’s poetry for its prosaic diction, lack of tradi-
tional adornments, occasional use of vulgar or unprecedented vocabulary,
and frequent deviations from standard poetic syntax. In his only fully articu-
lated statement of his poetics, Tamekane-kyō wakashō (Lord Tamekane’s
Notes on Poetry, 1287?), however, Tamekane cast his “deviations” as a
positive agenda based, among other things, on the old idea of poetry as the
expression of one’s heart, as formulated in the preface to Kokinshū. To him,
pursuit of this ideal, which he saw as a way to achieve harmony with the
universe (and the social order), allowed the poet some latitude in expression,
while still mandating a commitment to fixed topics and the poet’s feelings.
His ultimate goal was thus a fusion of the objects of perception and an
individual’s feeling based very much on the Buddhist-inspired teachings of
Shunzei and Teika, which emphasized “concentrating the mind.”
More than his poetic thought as such, what most offended the senior
house was doubtless Tamekane’s evident resistance to their authority. But he
had supporters, including most prominently Emperor Fushimi (1265–1317),

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who issued a command to him to compile an imperial anthology. For several

years the project was stymied by political conflicts that ended in Tamekane’s
temporary exile, but eventually it was completed. Containing 2,800 poems, it
was titled Gyokuyōshū (Collection of Jeweled Leaves, 1313) and was the largest
imperial anthology to date and a truly monumental work, including poems
from the earliest times to the present but with a decided emphasis on the
poems of Tamekane’s own allies, students, and patrons. Attacks from the
Nijō adherents were immediate, aimed at poems like the following
(Gyokuyōshū nos. 2220 and 1502) by Tamekane himself:

Mountain Hut in the Wind

Yamakaze wa Wind from the mountain
kakio no take ni blows over my bamboo fence –
fukisutete and goes on its way;
mine no matsu yori then from the pines on the peak
mata hibiku nari it echoes once again.

From among his Love poems

Toki no ma mo “Take just a moment
ware ni kokoro no to tell me if you feel for me
ikaga naru to as I feel for you!”
tada tsune ni koso – constantly, just this one thing
towamahoshikere is all I want to ask.
The first poem presents Tamekane’s poetics almost perfectly, presenting heigh-
tened consciousness in a brief span of time. But to Nijō critics such a scene
displayed no specifically courtly consciousness, no reasoning process, no tradi-
tional adornment, and no allusion to an earlier poem to emphasize indebtedness
to earlier eras. The second poem offended for the same reasons, and also because
syntactically it was virtually indistinguishable from prose. To Tamekane, both
poems represented attempts to become one with the topic and with minimal
mediation, while to Nijō adherents they did not even qualify as poems.
Gyokuyōshū was a triumph for Tamekane, but he did not have long to
celebrate before being sent into exile once again in 1316. This time he would
never return to the capital, dying in Kawachi province in 1332. In the interim,
Nijō poets continued to prevail at court, producing two imperial anthologies
and stifling any attempt at response by their rivals. Fushimi’s son Emperor
Hanazono (1297–1348) managed to keep the alternative tradition alive,
becoming one of the most intellectual of all emperors but spending virtually
his entire career in the shadows.

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Hanazono’s political frustrations were largely a result of the rebellion of

Emperor GoDaigo (1288–1339) against the Kamakura government in 1333–4,
which eventually led to a protracted period of division and dissension called
the era of the Southern and Northern Courts. The next fifty years were
confusing ones for everyone in literate society, including poets. A few of the
latter followed GoDaigo into the provinces, where they even compiled an
imperial anthology, the Shin’yōshū (Collection of New Leaves, 1381).
However, most stayed in Kyoto, always the hub of court culture, and
pursued their art among the new military elite, beginning with the new
shogun. Ashikaga Takauji (1305–58) had come in contact with poets of the
noble houses in Kamakura and quickly became a patron of the courtly arts in
general and poetry in particular. His patronage, and that of his successors and
the warrior houses surrounding them, would be a major factor in all cultural
affairs for as long as their regime lasted. Their commitment was less to any
particular style of poetry than it was to poetry as one way of maintaining
ideals of social order, but from the point of view of the poetic houses such a
situation was not unwelcome because it amounted to tacit recognition of
poetry as a discourse that was – on the surface, at least – above petty politics.
One proof that the new military leaders had no strong philosophical
commitments in the area of poetry and poetics was that at midcentury one
last imperial anthology was put together by the remnants of the Kyōgoku
tradition, now represented by Emperor Hanazono, Emperor Kōgon
(1313–64), and Eifukumon’in (1271–1342), consort of the late Fushimi – all of
whom were both poets and patrons. The product of their labor was an
imperial anthology called Fūgashū (Collection of Elegance, 1344–8). Like the
first one, this second Kyōgoku-style anthology was large, containing over
2,200 poems, and partisan in its emphasis on poets of the Jimyō’in imperial
line and its supporters. Scholars have tended to characterize it as a dark work,
reflecting the diminished fortunes of the Kyōgoku school and of the aristoc-
racy more generally. More than darkness, however, poems like the following
by Hanazono (no. 878), the chief force behind the anthology, express a stark
simplicity.

On the Feeling of Winter Dusk

Kureyaranu As day fades away
niwa no hikari wa there is light in my garden –
yuki ni shite but only from snow;
oku kuraku naru inside it is darker still,
uzumibi no moto next to my small coal fire.

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Later critics would dismiss Fūgashū as unorthodox (ifū), though without

specifying what they meant by the term. What probably offended was
poems like this one that seemed to present the world “as it is” (ari no
mama), without traditional rhetorical devices, using imagery and vocabulary
that was unusual if not completely unprecedented. For this and obvious
political reasons, younger poets would soon be counseled by Nijō teachers
not to read either of the Kyōgoku anthologies, damning them to marginal
status for centuries.

Competing orthodoxies
The poetic world from around 1350 appears at first glance to have been
dominated mostly by Nijō adherents, who did succeed in monopolizing
compilation of imperial anthologies, supported by the patronage of the
Ashikaga shoguns. Yet a close look at documents of the time shows that
the situation was more complex. As we have seen, the late 1300s was a volatile
time of ever-evolving power struggles among the political elite. And the same
was true in the world of poetry. For one thing, the Nijō house itself had
become factionalized by this time, producing rivalries that were sometimes
as intense as those of earlier ages between the main branches of the
Mikohidari house. Another complicating factor was the appearance in
Kyoto of Reizei Tamehide (d. 1372), a descendant of Tamesuke, who was a
superb poet who also claimed a treasure trove of manuscripts and teachings
that was the envy of all. This was enough to impress Hanazono, who allowed
him considerable involvement in the compilation of Fūgashū and entrusted
him with the leadership of some poetry gatherings. After several decades, he
achieved the rank of middle counselor at court, joining the ranks of the high
aristocracy (kugyō) and placing one of his sons in a Nijō lineage as heir,
thereby gaining access to additional manuscript holdings that could only
enhance the reputation of the Reizei as heirs of the Mikohidari tradition.
During the latter half of the fourteenth century, then, power in poetic
affairs was shared by a number of factions within the Nijō house, their
traditional allies in other noble houses, and the Reizei and their supporters
– each claiming lines of authority and all seeking favor from competing
imperial lineages, the high court nobility, the Ashikaga shoguns, and scores
of other military lineages. Even this does not tell the whole story, however,
because it leaves out an entire class of poets who were also gaining in
importance – namely, poets of commoner (jige) background, preeminent
among whom was a monk known as Tonna (also Ton’a; 1289–1372).

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A Buddhist monk of samurai lineage, Tonna could never hope to attain the
highest social position in the literary hierarchy. But he studied under Nijō
teachers and with their support was able to function as a poetry master for
the rest of a long life. Like his mentors, he lived in Kyoto, but in a cottage
(iori) in the precincts of a temple. In this it may seem that he followed the
example of Kamo no Chōmei (1155?–1216) and Saigyō (1118–90), but he was
unlike them in that he was never truly a recluse. His famous White Lotus
Estate, located in the grounds of Ninnaji Temple, was a substantial structure
surrounded by spacious gardens, where he hosted even high court aristocrats
and daimyō. In this sense, Tonna was the first of a new class of professional
poets who unlike earlier figures were primarily dependent on literary activ-
ities for their identity and financial support. A long line of jige poets would
follow in his footsteps.
Almost all of Tonna’s poems were composed for small anthologies or
gatherings, often in the homes of elite patrons, and almost all are on standar-
dized dai that had been so central to poetic composition since the 1100s.
Legends tell that he was incredibly quick in extemporaneous composition
and had the social skills required to maintain a viable literary practice
dedicated to teaching, trading in manuscripts, officiating at gatherings,
and of course the composition of poems. In his critical works, he followed
the tradition of Tameie in stressing the importance of training (keiko) rather
than just book-learning, in adhering to a conservative position in matters of
vocabulary and rhetoric, and in stressing the central place of ushin, or “deep
feeling,” in poetics. Other Shinkokinshū ideals such as yūgen and yōen,
however, he embraced only as long as they did not lead to rhetorical
excesses. In his own poetry we see no startlingly new conceptions, no
unusual phrasing, no extravagant metaphor, but instead poems of smoothly
flowing syntax, beautiful imagery, and restrained emotion – the latter often
expressed by already established affective connotations, such as the forlorn
sight of geese returning north in spring in the following example (no. 89)
from his personal anthology, Sōanshū (The Grass Hut Collection, 1359):

Returning Geese, in the Haze

Nagamureba Gazing far, I see
kasumihatete wa haze spreading in the distance;
taedae ni but in the gaps,
mata arawaruru appearing here, then there –
kari no hitotsura wild geese in one tattered line.

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Tonna’s success in creating such scenes would eventually make him a model for
young poets in particular, surpassing even Tameie as a master of what would
come to be called the “plain” (heitan) style. Some scholars have for this reason
dismissed his work as lacking in creativity, but a careful reading of his poetry
and critical writings reveals originality in his thinking. Nijō Yoshimoto in his
Kinrai fūteishō (Notes on Poetic Styles of the Recent Past, 1387) reports that when
responding to the suggestion of another poet that in writing on the topic
“Village Snow” one should not think of places famous for snow such as
Fushimi and Fukakusa, Tonna said that one should indeed think of such famous
places, but still produce a conception that was new (atarashiki kokoro). It was this
idea – that fixed topics represented a challenge to be met within the bounds of
convention, yet still creatively – that was at the heart of Tonna’s poetics.
After Tonna’s death, it was this same Nijō Yoshimoto (scion of a regental
lineage distinct from the Nijō of Teika’s descendants), known in modern
times for his role in the history of renga (linked verse), who carried the
conservative banner. In his youth he had been a member of Emperor
Hanazono’s salon, but now he characterized the Kyōgoku style as a danger
to order in an age he felt was in great need of stability. In particular, he
criticized the work of Tamekane as unorthodox (ifū), while praising his friend
Tonna for his mellifluous, smooth, and beautiful style.
Yoshimoto’s efforts were not in vain, for the period from 1400 to the time
of the Ōnin War was one of great poetic activity – and not only in the
expected circles. Documents show, for instance, that members of the princely
Fushimi house and their noble stewards held frequent poetic gatherings,
which resulted in an anthology that they doubtless hoped would later
become a resource for a future imperial collection. The anthology, known
as Kikuyōshū (The Chrysanthemum Leaf Collection, 1400?), contained 1,485
poems, almost all of them by people of the Fushiminomiya circle, including a
number of women, at a time when participation by court women in poetic
culture had nearly faded away. Another feature is that many of the poems are
in the Kyōgoku style, as is the case with a poem (no. 848) by a woman
identified as the Mother of Imadegawa Sanetomi (precise dates uncertain):

On the topic “Fishing Weirs”

Fukeyukeba As the hour grows late,
Uji no kawanami the sound of waves on Uji River
oto saete rings out cold and clear;
ajiro no tsuki no down onto the fishing weirs
kage zo kakareru comes light from the moon.

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It should come as no surprise that in 1400 descendants of the Kyōgoku

coteries were still producing poems that present the world “as it is.” Nijō
warnings to the contrary, some people were still reading Gyokuyōshū and
Fūgashū and claiming their own brand of “alternative” orthodoxy.
After Kikuyōshū, activity in the Fushiminomiya circle would continue.
Prince Fushiminomiya Sadafusa (1372–1456), whose son would one day
become emperor, left behind a personal anthology that shows broad partici-
pation in poetic affairs. And other houses, noble and military, were also very
active at the time. Indeed, one outstanding feature of poetic culture at the
turn of the century is a marked increase in references to tsukinamikai, or
monthly meetings, being held in various houses in the capital and in the
provinces. In contrast to formal poem contests or other kinds of gatherings,
monthly meetings were more intimate affairs, often involving a set group of
participants from among a high-ranking person’s followers, along with a
poetry master – the latter usually coming from one of the poetic houses in
the case of the cultural elite and from the ranks of the jige tradition in the case
of lower-ranking houses. Among other things, this new development would
provide an incentive toward the emergence of a cadre of truly “professional”
jige masters in the years to come and an increased participation in poetic
affairs by daimyō, who would be well represented when a new imperial
anthology appeared in 1439, called the Shinshokukokinshū (New Later
Collection of Ancient and Modern Times), a title that alluded back to
Kokinshū and to one of the earliest Nijō collections, Shokukokinshū (Later
Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, 1265).
It is a testament to the political conflicts of the time, however, that this
collection of 1439 contained not a single poem by the poet who in modern
times is considered the finest poet of the entire century, Shōtetsu. Of samurai
background, Shōtetsu began life in a Zen monastery but even after ordination
took poetry as his Way, which he studied under a Reizei master and the
warrior poet Imagawa Ryōshun (1326–1420?). At the time of the imperial
anthology – a distinctly Nijō project, in political terms – this became a
liability. Yet he was able to persevere in his practice by relying on his patrons
among the warrior class. Headnotes to Shōtetsu’s personal collection,
Sōkonshū (Grass Roots Anthology) – which at over 11,000 poems is the single
largest personal anthology in the medieval canon – show a calendar literally
filled with poetry gatherings at the homes of patrons and friends.
Shōtetsu’s style was criticized by the Nijō camp, and to some of his closest
disciples he revealed that he took Shinkokinshū and Teika as a model and not
his own contemporaries. He could write descriptive poetry in the ushin mode

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as well as anyone in his time, as is apparent from a poem (Sōkonshū no. 294)
from a hundred-poem sequence dated 1420.
Living in Seclusion
Iwagane no Beneath the cliff,
koke no shizuku mo water drips down onto moss
kogakurete hidden in the trees –
oto ni kokoro o but still its sound clears the heart
sumasu yado kana of one taking lodging there.
Yet other poems (Sōkonshū nos. 5999 and 8014), although adhering to their
topics within the rhetoric of refined feeling, exhibit a stylistic flair, conceptual
intricacy, and straightforward human interest that was beyond the range of
more conventional poets.
A Man Walking through the Snow
Kuru hito no Coming toward me
mukau fubuki ni against a hard, driving wind,
mono iwade the man says nothing;
yuki fumu oto no but I hear him tread the snow
sayuru michinobe going down the frozen road.
“Love, using the word ‘Bell,’” from a poem sequence
at the home of the Bizen Lay-Monk Jōgan held at the
end of the Third Month of 1453
Kiku kane mo As I listen,
koegoe taete bell sounds vanish, one by one,
Hatsusegawa over Hatsuse River –
sode ni ochikuru falling onto my sleeves,
miyako to zo naru becoming the capital.
The first of these poems captures a moment of “real” experience as well as
any poem by Tamekane; and the second presents a “surreal” conception that
one could only find in Teika’s early Zen daruma uta (“nonsense poems”).
Whether inspired by his own training in Zen or from his reading of earlier
poems, Shōtetsu’s work went beyond the borders of the ushin style into
realms of conceptual complexity and stylistic experiment that his colleagues
of the Nijō school were bound to reject.
Yet it is important to note again that Shōtetsu remained successful in his
literary practice and was by no means a recluse. Demand for poetry teachers in
the mid 1400s was at an all time high. Indeed, after the assassination of Ashikaga
Yoshinori in 1441, there was a resurgence of activity at court in which members

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of the Reizei faction, with the support of the statesman-scholar Ichijō Kanera
(or Kaneyoshi, 1402–181), were finally able to participate fully, according
Shōtetsu a stature similar in some ways to Tonna’s in his final years.

Gekokujō – the world turned upside down

One sign of the healthy situation of poetry in the mid fifteenth century was
planning for a new imperial anthology, sponsored by the shogun Ashikaga
Yoshimasa (1436–90). In the event, however, the project was abandoned
because of the Ōnin War (1467–77), a protracted conflict that signaled a
general breakdown, for complex economic and social reasons, of the author-
ity structure that had held society together since the beginning of Ashikaga
rule more than a century before. In the phraseology of historians, the world
had become a place where those at the bottom had gained power over those
at the top – gekokujō.
The decades after the Ōnin War are not given much attention in histories
of the uta, probably because – despite failed plans for one in the 1480s – they
produced no imperial anthology. Nonetheless, records show continuing
dedication to all aspects of poetic discourse among patrons and poets, and
to preservation of the court tradition through the restocking of libraries.
Moreover, it was during this period, largely through the efforts of the renga
master Sōgi (1421–1502), that the so-called Kokin denju (secret teachings of the
Kokinshū) were established, creating a mystique around the uta that added to
its authority among the warrior elite. While he and his students were not the
only claimants in the field of ancient poetic lore – others being the Reizei and
other noble houses – it was the teachings of the Sōgi lineage that Emperor
GoMizuno’o (1596–1680) would make so important in the early Edo period.
Less esoteric than those of earlier times, these transmissions often concen-
trated on exegetical matters, allegorical readings of certain privileged early
texts, and practices connected to poetry meetings and so on – things that
scholars of the Kokugaku (nativist studies) movement of the mid-Edo period
would dismiss as mere trivia but which still carried weight with the old
nobility and military families for whom such secret transmissions constituted
a major category of learning.
The most prominent of Sōgi’s courtier students was the courtier
Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537), whose voluminous diary displays a complex
and broad-ranging literary practice: a man who composed eleven thousand
poems (uta, renga, and also kanshi, poems in Chinese); lectured and wrote
commentaries on poetry and court classics; taught students; engaged in

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various kinds of literary commerce, including most prominently the copying

and “sale” of manuscripts and writing out of samples of his famed calligraphy
for clients; and indulged in other courtly pursuits, from incense blending to
the tea ceremony. Ironically, however, the range of Sanetaka’s activities
shows how much a courtier of his day had to trade on his literary knowledge
and skill for his sustenance. Although a fine poet deserving of scholarly
attention whose poems would rival Tonna’s in popularity among Edo period
poets, Sanetaka’s name is nearly always raised in literary histories in connec-
tion with the decline of court culture. And it is also true that he was unusual
in being able to stay in Kyoto when financial conditions forced many
courtiers into the provinces. It is emblematic of the sorry state of Teika’s
lineage, for instance, that the personal poetry collection of Reizei Tamekazu
(1486–1549) would be called Imagawa Tamekazu shū, bearing not his noble
surname but that of the military clan in whose domains he and his extended
family made their home for much of his life.
One by-product of this development was the emergence of “little Kyotos”
that welcomed displaced courtiers and their cultural skills. Over the last
several decades, Japanese textual scholars have been busy searching out
manuscripts that document these movements and their importance in the
spread of poetic culture to the new provincial elite. The results of their labors
already are making a more complete picture of literary culture during the
Sengoku age, one that concentrates not just on the court aristocracy but also
on high-ranking warrior figures – a fact hinted at by what we know of the life
of Hosokawa Yūsai (1534–1610), who is usually considered the last important
uta poet of the medieval age. The son of a shogun, Yūsai was raised as the
heir of the Hosokawa house and moved in the highest circles of military
society, fighting in numerous battles. In retirement, however, he lived in
Kyoto, and records show that all his life he was dedicated not only to bu
(arms) but also to bun (letters), receiving the secret teachings of the Nijō
lineage from a descendant of Sanetaka and following familiar patterns of
poetic practice. Indeed, his case shows that the economic struggles of the
court elite and the rise of other classes into participation in the cultural sphere
often resulted in retrenchment and not the reverse. The reasons for this
situation demand further research and debate, but two factors seem obvious:
first, the “communal” nature of poetic composition in the periods in ques-
tion, which in some ways made every poetic event an instantiation of social
hierarchies; and second, the strongly didactic foundations of medieval poetic
criticism, which draws on Chinese, Buddhist, and early Japanese sources to
explicitly connect work in the poetic realm to the maintenance of order, both

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cosmological and social. Finally, there is the dominance of the ushin aesthetic
itself, whose strong investment in ideas and habits of discipline and restraint –
especially against the backdrop of an age of social upheaval – had a profound
effect on all features of poetic discourse.
How aware Yūsai was of these factors as elements in his own poetic
discourse we cannot know. One poem dated 1596 from his personal collec-
tion, Shūmyōshū (The Wonders of Natural Order, 1671, compiled posthu-
mously), at least suggests a strong sense of connection with the past.
An extemporaneous poem written on “Spring Dawn”
for a monthly meeting on the 19th day of the
Second Month
Medetsuru All that I praised –
hana mo momiji mo cherry blossoms, crimson leaves,
tsuki yuki mo the moon and the snow –
kasumi ni kiyuru all fade off into the haze
haru no akebono in the faint light of spring dawn.
Here Yūsai neatly summarizes a whole year of aesthetic experience, using the
most precedented of images. Furthermore, the headnote to the poem refer-
ences centuries-old practices: the monthly meeting, fixed topics, and extem-
poraneous composition. To complete the picture one need only add that the
poem contains echoes of at least two earlier texts: the opening lines of the
famous Makura no sōshi (Pillow Book, c. 1005) of Sei Shōnagon (haru wa akebono:
“In spring – the dawn”), and a poem by Tamekane from Gyokuyōshū (no. 174):

From among his spring poems

Omoisomeki My heart has chosen:
yotsu no toki ni wa among the four seasons,
hana no haru flowery spring –
haru no uchi ni and within the spring itself,
akebono no sora the sky faintly lit at dawn.
The discursive trajectories of this poem alone are enough to suggest Yūsai’s
affiliations as a student of the entire tradition, including even marginalized
texts like Gyokuyōshū. And it is this sense of continuing participation in a
larger narrative, as much as any narrow concept of orthodoxy, that most
characterizes his work and the poetic culture of the late sixteenth century in
general. Given the context of increasing economic diversity, political uphea-
val, and artistic creativity, this is an ironic fact, to say the least; yet it is one
that emerges clearly from the textual evidence. Even warlords like Toyotomi

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Hideyoshi (1536–98) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), who are well known
as devotees of relatively new arts such as noh drama, haikai, and the tea
ceremony, continued the traditions of their warlord forebears by composing
uta and renga and patronizing masters of poetry, whose Way was just as
highly esteemed in 1600 as it had been four hundred years before.

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 25
Hyakunin isshu and the popularization
of classical poetry
tomomi yoshino

Hyakunin isshu, a collection of one hundred poems by one hundred poets

who lived from the seventh century to the thirteen century, was compiled by
Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). Because Teika’s collection initiated a new
genre, resulting in several different versions, his original collection is referred
to as the Ogura hyakunin isshu, after his villa on Mount Ogura, on the outskirts
of Kyoto.
As the son of Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), Teika was the scion of a leading
poetic family. Emperor GoToba (1180–1239), who became a young retired
emperor (in) in 1198, recognized his potential as a waka poet and subsequently
appointed him as one of the main editors of the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of
Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry, 1205), the eighth imperial waka anthology.
In 1221, GoToba attempted to raise an army to combat the shift of power from
the court to the military class, but failed and was sent into exile. Teika, who fell
out of grace with GoToba before the retired emperor’s defeat, grew in promi-
nence as both a courtier and poet and was given the prestigious task of single-
handedly editing the ninth imperial waka anthology, the Shinchokusenshū (New
Imperial Japanese Poetry Collection, 1232). It was during this time, in his late
years, that he decided to compile the Hyakunin isshu – not in response to an
imperial command, but for personal reasons.
Teika selected all the poems in the Hyakunin isshu from imperial waka
anthologies and arranged them, for the most part, in chronological order.
Poems nos. 1 and 2 are by Emperor Tenji (626–71) and Empress Jitō (645–702)
respectively, while poems nos. 99 and 100 are by GoToba-in and Juntoku-in
(1197–1242). The first pair – Emperor Tenji and his daughter – laid the founda-
tions for the future Heian court culture, while the last pair – GoToba-in and his
son, Juntoku-in – attempted to overthrow the new military leaders who
eventually brought an end to the flowering of the Heian court. Bracketed by
two father–child pairs, the Hyakunin isshu thus represents both a collection of
superior poems and a literary history of Heian court culture.

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Hyakunin isshu is heavily colored by Teika’s own aesthetic leanings. It

contains forty-three love poems – nearly half of the collection and an
extremely high percentage compared to that in imperial waka anthologies.
There are also twice as many autumn poems as there are spring poems.
(In imperial waka anthologies, the number of spring and autumn poems
were about equal.) Teika also favored poets who were exiled, met with
premature death, suffered from love affairs, or were unable to advance
socially.
Hyakunin isshu became popular after its emergence largely due to its
association with Teika. Waka poets had been accustomed to composing
sequences of a hundred poems on set topics, and the Hyakunin isshu
created an exciting new variation. After Teika’s death, his children and
grandchildren – many of whom rose to prominence in the world of waka
poetry – regarded the Hyakunin isshu as a secret transmission containing the
essence of Teika’s poetics, which they guarded closely, preventing its wide
circulation. By the fifteenth century, however, teachers of waka had come to
see it as a fundamental guide to the practice of poetic composition and
produced many commentaries, which they passed on to their pupils.
In the Edo period the Hyakunin isshu came to represent the entire tradition
of court poetry, and it saw a sudden increase in readership, particularly due to
the new print culture, which enabled people from all classes to educate
themselves. Hyakunin isshu also became the foremost primer for those inter-
ested in poetic composition, and there was probably no literate person who
was not familiar with the collection, which came to represent what it meant
to be educated.
From the Edo period, the poem collection circulated not only in the form
of printed books but as toys, games, illustrated texts, and parodies. The
foremost example is Hyakunin isshu karuta, the card game, which emerged
in the early Edo period (after the introduction of illustrated cards from
Portugal) and which became one of its most popular formats. The following
example (no. 97, by Teika himself) is divided into the top half (kami no ku),
consisting of three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables, and the bottom half (shimo no ku),
made up of two seven-syllable lines.
Konu hito o Like the salt sea-weed,
Matsuho no ura no Burning in the evening calm,
yuunagi ni On Matsuo’s shore.
yaku ya moshio no All my being is aflame,
mi mo kogaretsutsu Awaiting one who does not come.

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The top half describes a landscape, which becomes a metaphor for the
frustrated love implied in the bottom half. In the card game as it is played
now, when the beginning of the poem is read aloud, the players compete to
snatch up the card containing the bottom half.
The Hyakunin isshu has taken many forms. During the Pacific War a
collection called Aikoku hyakunin isshu (The Patriotic Hyakunin isshu)
appeared, praising the emperor and encouraging loyalty to the nation and
the throne. Recently, a girls’ comic book series by Sugita Kei entitled Chōyaku
hyakunin isshu: uta koi (Super Translation Hyakunin isshu: The Love of Poetry,
2010 onward) has become popular among students. This series takes certain
episodes – especially those dealing with romantic encounters – from the lives
of poets who appear in the Hyakunin isshu. Interestingly, the poets speak in
modern Japanese and sport modern hairstyles. Today Hyakunin isshu is one of
the most familiar pieces of classical literature in Japan and without a doubt
will reappear in the future in many new forms.

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 26
Medieval recluse literature: Saigyō,
Chōmei, and Kenkō
jack stoneman

Inja bungaku, or “recluse literature,” and the related label sōan bungaku
(“thatched hut literature”) are terms coined in the twentieth century to
describe works in a variety of genres, such as waka (traditional Japanese
poetry), setsuwa (anecdotes), and zuihitsu (essays), by a broad array of authors
of the medieval period.1 Saigyō (1118–90), Chōmei (1155–1216), and Kenkō
(c. 1283–c. 1352) exemplify the recluse ideal while simultaneously problematiz-
ing the idea and practice of isolation. We will see that, though individual
recluses practiced a variety of types of renunciation, these men all found
solace and understanding in natural environments; discovered new ways of
seeing and expressing the plight of seeking salvation in a world defined by
impermanence and death; and carved out a discursive space within their
writings where self-examination could lead to self-realization through artistic
expression. Deeply felt religious and philosophical yearnings for a life better
lived led medieval men and women, young and old, to retreat from society,
though the catalyst for renunciation was often a worldly disappointment or
tragedy. Most recluses were Buddhist monks or nuns, though adherence to
Buddhism was certainly not a requirement. There was, in fact, a broad
spectrum of modes of withdrawal from the secular world. Similarly, there
are a number of terms in Japanese for eremites and the process of leaving the
mundane behind. What drove many people, some of whom had every reason
to remain (wealth, family, careers), to reject and escape from the world in
favor of the eremitic life? For the samurai-turned-monk Saigyō, this question
has never been fully answered. The following poem (Sankashū,
Miscellaneous 723) was likely composed in the spring preceding his autumn

1
“Inja bungaku” generally refers to recluse literature of the twelfth through fourteenth
centuries, but recluse literature extends well before this period to include such authors,
works, and figures as the poet/monk Henjō (816–90), Yoshishige no Yasutane’s Chiteiki
(Record of the Pond Pavilion, 982), and the monk Gyōki (668–749) as depicted in the
setsuwa collection Nihon ryōiki (Record of Miraculous Events in Japan, c. 787–824).

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tonsuring, and states that he desired to leave the world without stating
explicitly why.
Sora ni naru The empty sky
kokoro wa haru no of my heart this spring
kasumi nite mist rising
yo ni araji to mo to thoughts of
omoitatsu kana leaving the world behind.
Saigyō was born Satō Norikiyo, the son of a wealthy aristocratic family who
had served sovereigns for generations as bodyguards and constables.
Norikiyo was a retainer to the powerful Tokudaiji family and served in
Retired Emperor Toba’s (1103–56) Northern Guard, a group of bodyguards
and cultural companions. At the age of twenty-two he left his career and
family (a wife and perhaps two or three children) to become a Buddhist
monk. Saigyō lived sometimes in seclusion, sometimes residing and working
at temples, and sometimes traveling. Throughout his fifty years as a Buddhist
practitioner, Saigyō also composed waka, gaining the respect of other poets
in his lifetime and the adulation of succeeding generations.
Saigyō inherited from the poetic tradition a set of words and images that
defined a certain ideal of reclusion. By the end of the Heian period (twelfth
century), the trope of reclusion in waka was dominated by nuns, many of
whom had been imperial women or ladies-in-waiting at court. The hallmark
image of the genteel reclusion expressed in their poems was the thatched hut.
Thatched huts in poetry and prose of earlier centuries had been associated
with travel, fields, and even ritual isolation due to pollution. But by Saigyō’s
time the hut had become a markedly religious space that, while lonely, was
also desirable and even beautiful, with associated words such as moonlight,
autumn leaves, garden, gate, cherry blossoms, and snow accruing to the
topos. The huts of nuns were generally located in semi-rural areas just
outside the capital – places already known for their gentle natural beauty.
In addition to thatched huts, mountain homes (yamazato) became important
images in recluse poetry of Saigyō’s time as hermits retreated deeper into
mountainous areas farther from the capital, such as Kōya and Yoshino in
present-day Nara prefecture, where Saigyō spent many years. The following
poem (Sankashū, Winter 513) exemplifies the solitary and decidedly remote
aspects of Saigyō’s reclusion poetry while highlighting the poet’s positive
assessment of such a space and lifestyle.

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Sabishisa ni I wish there were

taetaru hito no another here
mata mo are na who could bear this loneliness –
iori narabemu we’d build our huts side by side
fuyu no yamazato in this wintry mountain home.
To the loneliness of reclusion, Saigyō added stark and even eerie images, such
as owls, windstorms, and monkeys, sometimes commenting upon the gap
between what he perhaps expected of the recluse life as portrayed in the
bucolic and elegant reclusion poetry that preceded him and what he actually
experienced deep in the mountains. He is not disappointed, however, in the
life of a hermit.
In the case of Kamo no Chōmei, we have a better idea of why he left
society and became a monk. Chōmei was a member of a family of Shinto
priests at the Shimogamo Shrine in the capital Kyoto. Nevertheless, he
devoted himself not to religious duties, but to music and poetry, even after
the death of his father in 1172 or 1173, when he might have been expected to
take over his father’s position. Chōmei studied with the venerable poet
Shun’e (1113–91), participated in many poetry gatherings and contests in his
twenties and thirties, and in 1201 was appointed a member of the court
Bureau of Poetry. In 1204, he was passed over for appointment as head of
the Tadasu Shrine in favor of his second cousin Sukeyori. Emperor GoToba
(1180–1239) offered to grant Chōmei a comparable position at another shrine,
but he refused and abruptly left the capital, settling for a time in Ōhara, an
area north of the capital popular with Buddhist recluses. In 1208 he moved to
Hino, south of the capital, where he built the very small hut immortalized in
his most famous work, Hōjōki (Account of my Ten-Foot-Square Hut, 1212),
and lived out the remainder of his life.2
Hōjōki begins: “The flow of the river is never ceasing, and yet the water is
never the same. The bubbles that float in the still pools vanish then re-form,
never staying for long. People and dwellings in the world, too, are much like
this.” Though Chōmei’s reasons for leaving secular life could be considered
worldly, his literary works are deeply dyed with the hue of impermanence
(mujō) and the disconsolate tone of the End of Days. For Saigyō and Chōmei,
the world had recently entered the last stage of the Buddhist Dharma, or

2
The fourteenth-century text Bunkidan (Conversations at a Writing Desk) tells a different
story of Chōmei’s exit from capital society. It asserts that Chōmei played a “secret
musical piece” (hikyoku) on his biwa (lute) without the permission of his teacher, an
unthinkable offense. The anger of his teacher, Fujiwara no Takamichi (1166–1237), drove
Chōmei from the capital and into the priesthood.

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mappō, the degenerate age in which devotees are unable to achieve salvation
through the teachings of the Buddha Sakyamuni and society becomes
increasingly corrupt and tumultuous. Such social changes were easily
observed by Saigyō and Chōmei as the country crumpled into civil war in
the 1180s, and again by Kenkō as court and warrior factions continued to
struggle for power in the fourteenth century. In an effort to convince readers
of the evanescence and futility of human life, Chōmei describes both man-
made and natural disasters, such as the great whirlwind of 1180, the moving of
the capital the same year, the famine of 1181–2, and the great earthquake of
1185. According to Chōmei, it is precisely in such an age that one must shun
the depraved trappings of secular life and rely on the beneficence of savior
figures such as Amida Buddha, who promised to save believers who chant his
name in faith and are then reborn into his Western Pure Land Paradise.
The gloom of an apocalyptic world did not prevent these recluses from
finding beauty and even consolation in their natural environments.
Throughout his life as a monk and poet, Saigyō scrutinized his own spiritual
state by examining nature. The following poem (Sankashū, Spring 76) is
thought to have been composed shortly after he became a monk.
Hana ni somu Why does this heart
kokoro no ika de stained by blossoms
nokoriken remain
sutehateteki to in this body that I thought
omou waga mi ni had tossed all that away?
Though his love for blossoms continued throughout his life, it seems that
Saigyō was eventually able to master his heart and mind. Rather than
blaming the blossoms that “stain,” as he states in a poem written late in his
life, he gives thanks to the blossoms that brought him to an enlightened state.
Toward the end of Hōjōki, Chōmei describes his hermitage and the nature
surrounding it in densely poetic and emotional language, several times
alluding to Saigyō’s poetry.
The place is not inconvenient to contemplation. In spring I see waves of
wisteria. They are like the purple clouds [of Amida’s Paradise], glowing in
the West. In summer I hear the cuckoo. Each time we share our feelings, he
promises to guide me along the mountain path to death. In autumn, I am
surrounded by the cries of the evening cicadas. They sound as if they are
lamenting the empty shell of this world.

Chōmei’s language reflects the trend in recluse literature to conflate the poetic
diction of the four seasons with the language and concepts of Buddhism,

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making nature not only the great mirror of human emotion but also a
manifestation of the Buddhist Dharma, or Truth. Chōmei goes on to describe
outings he takes with a young boy who lives at the base of his mountain.

As we return, depending on the season, we pluck twigs of cherry blossoms,

or find brightly colored fall leaves, pick brackens, or gather nuts and berries,
some of which we offer to the Buddha, and some of which we take home as
mementos. When the night has grown still, I think of old friends as I gaze at
the moon from my window . . . When I hear the pheasant’s melancholic cry,
I wonder if it is the voice of my father or mother perhaps, and when the deer
from the mountain’s peak draw near without fear, I realize how far from the
world I’ve come.

The critical distance achieved through renunciation and hermit life far from
civilization is expressed through Chōmei’s and Saigyō’s identification with
their natural environment. For these writers, the hut becomes not only a
space apart from the secular world but also a space absorbed by the world of
nature and the Buddhist Dharma.
Despite Chōmei’s compassionate relationship with his environs, he con-
cludes that his fondness for his hut and the life of a hermit is in fact an
attachment that hinders his spiritual progression. “Why,” he asks, “do I waste
my time recounting useless pleasures?” Perhaps Chōmei’s self-deprecation is
a literary device. However, in the final passages of his essay Chōmei earnestly
questions his own spiritual state, arriving not at a confirmation, nor a
commitment. He ends by writing, “I merely employ my unruly tongue,
though only half-heartedly, to recite Amida Buddha’s name two or three
times, then quit.”
Yoshida Kenkō begins his most prominent work, a collection of observa-
tions and anecdotes called Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, c. 1331), with
similar self-deprecation: “How utterly maddening to think that I’ve spent all
day, out of boredom, sitting here before my inkstone, jotting down at
random whatever useless thoughts have crossed my mind!” This collection
of seemingly random reflections and commentary reveals the leisured life of a
recluse while stopping short of the penetrating self-examination found in the
works of Chōmei and Saigyō. It is unclear whether Kenkō ever really left
capital society completely – Michael Marra (1984, 313–50) has called him a
“semi-recluse.” And, as with Saigyō, it is unclear what drove him to become a
Buddhist monk. Like Chōmei, Kenkō came from a Shinto family of priests
and diviners, his father being a priest at the Yoshida Shrine in Kyoto. And, like
Chōmei, he devoted himself to poetry and court matters, achieving lesser

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fifth rank, lower grade, and a position in the Left Palace Guards. Around age
thirty, for reasons unknown, Kenkō left court and took the Buddhist tonsure.
Thereafter he lived near the capital, in Shūgakuin and Yokawa, spending
some time in the Kamakura and Iga areas as well. During his reclusion, he
continued to participate in poetic society and even continued to consult on
matters of court protocol, and it is possible that, during his time in Kamakura,
he acted as a tutor to warrior elites who wished to assimilate court culture.
Tsurezuregusa has much to say about the human world, but not from the
pervasively Buddhist and pessimistic vantage point of Chōmei’s Hōjōki.
Kenkō’s gaze is generally outward, and often confirming. Nevertheless, he
finds occasion to lament and to criticize the state of the world around him,
particularly as he compares it to a golden, courtly past. And, as did Chōmei
and Saigyō before him, he finds in nature powerful metaphors for human life
that both admonish and comfort. “If man were never to fade away like the
dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but
lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move
us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty” (Keene, 7). He also
writes, “The changing of the seasons is deeply moving in its every manifesta-
tion.” And, “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon
only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to
lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring – these are even
more deeply moving” (Keene, 18, 115).
Writing of the solitary life, Kenkō asserts:

Some say, “As long as your mind is set on enlightenment, it does not make
much difference where you live. Even if you live with your family and
mingle in society, why should that interfere with your prayers for happiness
in the future life?” Men who speak in such terms know nothing whatsoever
about the meaning of prayers for the future life. Indeed, once a man realizes
how fleeting this life is and resolves to escape at all costs from the cycle of
birth and death, what pleasure can he take in daily attendance on some lord
or in schemes to benefit his family? A man’s mind is influenced by his
environment, and unless he has peaceful surroundings he will have difficulty
in carrying out his religious duties. (Keene, 52)

Even while extolling the hermit life, Kenkō does not seem to have spent all
his days praying for the life to come. In fact, he does not expect his choice of
the hermit lifestyle alone to lead to salvation. He is as concerned with the
problems of beauty, perception, and behavior as he is with doctrine, faith, or
self-examination. The influence exerted by Tsurezuregusa on later generations

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of Japanese is more because of the aesthetic canon it expresses than of its role
as a record of Kenkō’s retreat from the world. Kenkō successfully crystallized
in his writings ideals such as wabi (subdued simplicity) and sabi (rustic
elegance), so important to late medieval and early modern Japanese taste-
makers (especially tea masters), which have now become cliché, and yet are
as potent as ever in defining Japanese sensibilities.
Somebody once remarked that thin silk was not satisfactory as a scroll
wrapping because it was so easily torn. Ton’a [1289–1372] replied, “It is
only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-
of-pearl has fallen from the roller that a scroll looks beautiful.” . . . In every-
thing, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving some-
thing incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is
room for growth. (Keene, 70)

The attention Kenkō devotes to taste, artistic sensibilities, and the mastery of
various Ways (michi) is indicative of a trend within medieval eremitism to
find in the very pursuit of the arts a form of personal salvation.
Suki was a term in use from the Heian period (794–1185) forward denoting
utter devotion to a chosen pursuit, often an artistic avocation. Sukimono (or
sukisha) were men whose devotion to an art, such as poetry, painting, music
and the like, bordered on obsession. Suki also implies the relative freedom
with which sukimono pursued their interests regardless of, or outside of,
societal restraints. In his Hosshinshū (Collection of Awakenings, 1216),
Chōmei defines suki in the following manner:
Not preferring interactions with people; not worrying about losing status;
sorrowing over the scattering of cherry blossoms; contemplating the rising
and setting of the moon, thereby always making one’s heart clear; and not
allowing oneself to be sullied by the filth of the world – these are the
important points, and thus naturally lead one to a realization of the nature
of life and death and the exhausting of attachments to fame and wealth. This
is the way to enter the path of true emancipation.

In language echoing his own adoration of Saigyō, Chōmei asserts that the
appreciation of nature (and by extension the literary expression of such)
within the context of contemplative retreat from society leads one toward
salvation. In more straightforward language, Kenkō declares, “Expert
knowledge in any art is a noble thing” (Keene, 45). For Kenkō, any Way is
a path toward self-betterment and enlightenment. For Chōmei and Saigyō,
though they are at times uneasy with the attachment they feel to the lovely
forms of nature and the pleasant settings of reclusion, devotion to poetry

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and music are hōben (expedient means) that lead toward a more refined
spiritual state.
Many readers and scholars have pointed out the contradictions to be found
in the works of Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō. The “dyed by cherry blossoms”
poem of Saigyō cited above is one example. The conflicted experience of
eremites in medieval Japan is also reflected in Chōmei’s abrupt about-face
from an instructive, even condemning, voice from afar recounting the foibles
and follies of his society in the greater part of Hōjōki to a self-remonstrating,
questioning seeker at the end of the essay. Similarly, Kenkō’s apparent
worldliness and enjoyment of secular pursuits while in retreat as a monk
point to the complex and often contradictory lives medieval recluses led.
Most of the writings of these three men are fragmentary, and not meant to be
read as a cohesive whole. Perhaps the greatest enjoyment, and enlighten-
ment, to be gained by reading their literary expressions will be found in
embracing the contradictions, varying hues, and struggles found in the life of
a religious recluse.
Medieval recluse literature chronicles the numerous forces that pulled
hermits and travelers both toward and away from the poles of the mundane
and the sacred. In their retreats and movements, these men traversed secular
and religious spaces, centers and peripheries, throughout their lives as
monks. Centers such as capital society, poetic exchange, and loved ones
exerted a centripetal force on eremites, even if they had renounced such
things. At the same time, Buddhist belief, longing for peace and release, and a
desire to achieve salvation propelled men and women with centrifugal force
toward peripheries. These peripheries were most often mountains, some-
times temples, where small huts provided shelter from both weather and the
secular world, but only tenuously. Peripheries also included far-flung pro-
vincial locales, and travel itself became a form of renunciation in the late
medieval and early modern periods, especially for poets who modeled their
poetics and lives after medieval recluse writers.
The renga (linked verse) poet Sōgi (1421–1502) and the haikai (unorthodox
verse) poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) both looked to Saigyō especially as an
exemplar. Sōgi traveled all around Japan, composing renga and chronicling
his travels in such works as Shirakawa kikō (Record of a Journey to Shirakawa,
1468) and Tsukushi no michi no ki (Record of the Road to Tsukushi, 1480).
Bashō memorialized the 500th anniversary of Saigyō’s death by setting out on
the path his hero had taken through northern Japan centuries earlier, even-
tually recording his journey as Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep
North, 1694). The language of reclusion developed by Saigyō, Chōmei,

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Kenkō and other medieval writers was adopted by later generations of

writers who themselves traversed centers and peripheries, struggling with
the question of how involved in the world a poet should be. When creating
poetry that evoked the loneliness of travel, or the solitude of seclusion, Sōgi,
Bashō, and others borrowed the language created in the early centuries of the
medieval period, best represented in Saigyō’s poetry – moonlight winnowing
through the roof of a dilapidated hut, chestnuts gathered in the mountains, or
a bird on a lone branch. Like their predecessors, poets of the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries found themselves in spaces that were
ambiguous, with forces pulling them toward and away from urban centers
and worldliness.
Perhaps the most important reason to reside and travel in such tenuous in-
between spaces was to somehow overcome the bifurcation of reality that
forced the question of whether to remain in the world or shun it. William
LaFleur wrote, “Saigyō’s sensitivity to the irony in human affairs is related to
his awareness of what goes off track when we dichotomize reality. He was
forced to see that even his own attempts to ‘leave the world’ were, if naïvely
misconstrued, attempts to find private peace in another such dichotomy”
(LaFleur, 2003, 65). Chōmei and Kenkō must have come to the same realiza-
tion. These writers achieved through reclusion a decentralized space in
which they could gain a level of freedom of movement, involvement, and
contemplation that allowed a broader spectrum of experience, a longer
perspective on the human world, and the opportunity to express for later
generations their struggles with the timeless dilemma of how to live more
perfectly in an imperfect world.

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 27
Medieval women’s diaries: from
Tamakiwaru to Takemukigaki
christina laffin

Literary diaries by women in the medieval period share many attributes of

Heian era diaries, from the Tosa nikki to Sanuki no Suke nikki, which have
traditionally been categorized as “ancient” (kodai or chūko) works. Those
that were written after the late twelfth century and before the mid four-
teenth century are categorized by modern scholars as “medieval” (chūsei)
works. Among the many literary diaries of the medieval period, eight stand
out as works by women: Tamakiwaru, Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū, Ben
no Naishi nikki, Utatane, Izayoi nikki, Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki, Towazugatari,
and Takemukigaki. These works were all written in the kana vernacular but
they differ in scope and style. Some document service to a patron
(Tamakiwaru, Ben no Naishi nikki, Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki, Takemukigaki),
others echo classical tales of the past (Utatane, Towazugatari), some resem-
ble travel diaries (Izayoi nikki, Towazugatari), another comprises a poetry
collection bound by prose (Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū), and most
bridge various genres.
Like Heian works, medieval diaries continued to be closely linked to tale
literature and to poetry. Even seemingly objective or “historical” diaries like
the Ben no Naishi nikki (The Diary of Ben no Naishi) show the strong
influence of monogatari. We see this when the author likens the sudden
tonsure of Tsuchimikado Akichika (1149–1202) to something out of a tale,
noting that “she felt as if she were hearing a story from the distant past”
(Hulvey, 127). Similarly, for many women writers, The Tale of Genji acted as a
lens through which to filter their own lives. Works like Utatane (Fitful
Slumbers, c. 1265) weave expressions or tropes from the Genji into nearly
every page. In Towazugatari (The Unrequested Tale, c. 1306), the author
parallels her experiences with those of specific heroines in the Genji and
describes reenactments of episodes from the tale at the court of her patron,
the Retired Emperor GoFukakusa (1243–1304; r. 1246–59). The Tale of Genji
thus functioned as a narrative model and an encyclopedic source for themes

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and expressions in women’s diaries as well as a precedent for events carried

out at court.
Poetry also played a prominent role in women’s works as a mode of a
communication, a narrative strategy, and way of binding the author’s life with
those of other famous figures, whether historical or fictional. The rise of new
forms and styles, such as renga (linked poetry), can be seen within medieval
diaries. Lady Nijō (1258–?) describes her attendance at various social gatherings
where linked verse was composed, and the poems in the Ben no Naishi nikki
include renga. Some diaries, like Izayoi nikki (Diary of the Sixteenth Night
Moon, c. 1283), consist largely of poetic sequences that chronicle the author’s
visit to famous locations or her correspondence with other court poets.
Poetic inspiration was one of the many motivations for medieval travel
and the development of travel diaries was closely linked to the establishment
of set literary routes and sites a writer was expected to visit. Each poetic
toponym, known literally as a “poem pillow” (utamakura), was associated
with an accretion of famous poems that determined appropriate literary
images a traveler was expected to cite, including season, flora, mood, and
past literary figures. Literary sojourners thus built on poetic tradition while
contributing their own compositions.
Stylistically, medieval works by women show a greater tendency to
incorporate language traditionally gendered “male,” such as kanbun (classical
Chinese) expressions. Medieval diaries also tend to document dates more
clearly and frequently than earlier works. The focus on temporality seen in
the Ben no Naishi nikki makes it similar to the hi-nami nikki (daily journals)
written in classical Chinese by men. In terms of content, medieval diaries by
women often describe public life and seem more concerned with document-
ing the major events of the era than with describing the author’s personal life
and relationships, as was common in Heian diaries – although Towazugatari
offers a counterexample. Many of the medieval diaries are designed to justify
the author’s position by citing poetry, status at court, professional activities,
and familial background. Diaries could thus be used to highlight the author’s
accomplishments and were one way in which women continued to contri-
bute as writers and poets.
Outside the literary field, the lives of women were changing due to
transformations in marriage and residential practices, inheritance patterns,
and property rights. The uxorilocal wife-visiting (tsumadoi-kon) or groom-
taking (shōsei-kon) marriages of the Heian period were gradually replaced
with virilocal bride-taking (yometori-kon) marriages. Property was no longer
inherited matrilineally, but instead passed to a single male heir, though it

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could be transferred to a daughter for her lifetime before reverting to a male

inheritor. As the financial and political power of the imperial court decreased,
women’s employment at court and opportunities for patronage became
more limited. Perhaps due to fewer chances for professional success in the
capital, half of the works below consist mostly of descriptions of life outside
the court, including lengthy records of travel.
Journeys were of central interest in medieval diaries. Travel is such a
common theme within these works that the genres of nikki (diaries) and
kikō bungaku (travel literature) are understood as largely overlapping. Beyond
the poetic impetus for travel, it was also a necessary activity from a political
standpoint. The duopolity of the Kamakura period, with the courtier capital
in Heian-kyō (present Kyoto) and the warrior center in Kamakura, in the east,
required the movement of information and goods between two urban
centers. Women and men often accompanied patrons and relatives on
journeys between the capital and Kamakura or provincial sites. They also
undertook frequent pilgrimages to shrines in and around the capital, includ-
ing Kiyomizu, Kamo, Inari, Uzumasa, Hase, and Ishiyama. For some women,
such as Lady Nijō, travel was a form of practice used to accrue religious merit
that would counter past transgressions and lead to the salvation of their loved
ones and themselves. These journeys by educated noblewomen contributed
to the wider dispersal of court culture and the marketing of court women’s
specialized knowledge on poetry, painting, The Tale of Genji, design, interior
decoration, and etiquette. Outside the capital, elite women were highly
valued as mentors and their diaries record frequent interaction with local
poets, warriors, entertainers, and clergy.
Medieval diaries by women have traditionally been represented as lesser
examples of the court literature that flourished during the Heian era, but recent
scholarship has moved away from this aesthetic approach and focused on the
political transformation that impacted women’s lives and the themes, styles,
and engagements with past works that can be seen in these diaries. The brief
summaries that follow show the diversity of female-authored works from the
Kamakura (1185–1336) and Northern and Southern Court (1336–92) periods and
highlight some of the many reasons these works deserve greater study.

Tamakiwaru (Fleeting Is Life, 1219)

Authored by the daughter of Bifukumon’in Kaga and the eminent poet
Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), Tamakiwaru depicts the author’s service to
three imperial women: Retired Empress Kenshunmon’in (1142–76), Princess

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Shunkamon’in (1195–1211), and Princess Hachijōin (1136–1211). The work

consists of a diary and a section that was appended by Fujiwara no Teika
(1162–1241). The diary may have functioned as both a record of Kengozen’s
employment and a reference guide for women serving at court, perhaps
intended for the author’s adopted daughter. It is written from the perspec-
tive of a tonsured woman reflecting on more than four decades of court
service.
Currently divided into fifty-three sections covering the years 1168 to 1211,
the diary opens with a poem on the fleeting nature of life (tamakiwaru inochi),
noting that the author was motivated to write by her deep sorrow and lonely
existence. Now in her sixties, she produces this record as a memento of her
illustrious days serving Kenshunmon’in. “To what could I compare her?” she
asks. “I search for something to which she might naturally be compared, but
it is useless, for the lustrous beauties of today only pale in her radiance”
(Wheeler, 276). The descriptions of her patron’s court as a place of grandeur
and beauty act as a tribute to Kenshunmon’in while depicting the lavish and
glorious era of Taira dominance. The narrator represents herself as an
observer reporting on court events and a woman who took great pride in
her service to three patrons.

Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu shū (The Collection of

Lady Daibu, c. 1232)
Like Tamakiwaru, the Ukyō no Daibu shū offers a window into life at court
during the tumultuous period when the Taira clan lost their hold over the
imperial court and many were driven from the capital. Lady Daibu
(c. 1157–after 1232) was daughter of the calligrapher, musician, and Genji
scholar Fujiwara (Sesonji) Koreyuki (d. 1175). She served Empress
Kenreimon’in (1155–1213), who was daughter to Taira no Kiyomori (1118–81),
consort to Emperor Takakura (1161–81; r. 1168–80), and mother to Antoku
(1178–85; r. 1180–5). Lady Daibu’s work depicts numerous Taira warriors and
often eulogizes their lives and character as she learns of their deaths in battle.
Reflecting on her deceased Taira lover, Lady Daibu writes, “Sukemori’s image
appeared before my eyes, and once again they were dimmed with tears . . . The
memories welled up in me, but to describe them would be more than I could
bear” (Harries, 215). As a diary by a court woman it is unusual in containing
numerous references to political events.
Lady Daibu’s “collection” is structured as a set of 350 poems that have been
contextualized by prose. It can be likened to a poetry collection with

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headnotes explaining poems, but the prose sections are lengthier than those
traditionally found in private collections and often provide content unrelated
to the poems that follow. The work has been received traditionally as a diary,
in part because the author provides an introduction in which she claims her
writings are nothing like a personal poetry collection, and a conclusion in
which she reflects on life, the years that have accrued, and how she has
gradually recorded this and shared her writings.
The diary focuses on Lady Daibu’s service to Kenreimon’in and her
relationship with Taira no Kiyomori’s grandson Sukemori (b. c. 1161), from
1177 until his death in 1185 at the Battle of Dannoura. After retiring from
Kenreimon’in’s court, Lady Daibu was later recruited to serve Emperor
GoToba (1180–1239, r. 1183–98), and the latter half of the work focuses on
her service to GoToba and her mourning of Sukemori. The Ukyō no Daibu shū
can be read alongside works like Tamakiwaru and Takimukigaki that represent
women’s perspectives during a war-torn era. Lady Daibu’s emphasis on the
refinement of the Taira men functions as a tribute to the Taira and a
sorrowful commentary on their decline.

Ben no Naishi nikki (The Diary of Ben no Naishi)

The Ben no Naishi nikki (date unknown) depicts the events of the court from
the perspective of a woman who served Emperor GoFukakusa (1243–1304;
r. 1246–59). Ben no Naishi (c. 1228–c. 1270) was an accomplished poet, known
especially for her talent in composing renga. The diary documents poetry
gatherings and contains more than three hundred poems, including both
waka and renga, composed by the author and others. Ben no Naishi was
recruited by Emperor GoSaga (1220–72; r. 1242–6) together with her
younger sister Shōshō no Naishi (?–1265) to serve at the court of his son
GoFukakusa. The diary that she produced may have been commissioned by
GoSaga as a record of his son’s rule; it fulfills this role by presenting a
seemingly factual account of the years 1246 to 1252, the first half of
GoFukakusa’s rule. The original text likely documented GoFukakusa’s
entire reign, but the latter half was lost. Currently organized into 175
sections, the diary begins with GoFukakusa’s enthronement and ends
abruptly in 1252.
In compiling her diary, Ben no Naishi appears to have sometimes bor-
rowed from her sister’s recollections of events to provide descriptions at
ceremonies she did not attend, or to augment her own memory. Her
descriptions focus on official events, such as festivals, ceremonies, religious

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rituals, banquets, poetry gatherings, and musical performances, as well as

newsworthy happenings such as conflagrations and promotions in rank. She
notes, for example, the sovereign’s haircut: “His Lordship the regent came to
announce a royal haircut and added that female courtiers should attend
wearing ceremonial dress” (Hulvey, 109). The diary shows the observance
of annual court events from the perspective of a female attendant, and the
various duties involved. The work dwells on the happier events of the court
and offers few glimpses into the author’s private life, similar to the many
male-authored kanbun diaries that depict events of the court calendar. The
focus on court ceremonies can be understood as an extension of the role of
female court attendants as scribes of court events who represent the emperor
they serve. The diary thus highlights a new development in the medieval
period in its focus on court proceedings and the role of female court
attendants as recorders of imperial history. It can also be read alongside
communally recorded official kana journals by women serving at court, such
as the Oyudono no ue no nikki (Daily Records of the Honorable Ladies Serving
beyond the Bath, 1477–1826). Ben no Naishi nikki thus blurs the lines between
official history, personal diary, and court record.

Utatane (Fitful Slumbers, c. 1265) and Izayoi nikki

(Diary of the Sixteenth Night Moon, c. 1283)
These two diaries differ in terms of style, content, and narrator, but both are
thought to have been authored by Nun Abutsu (c. 1225–83). Utatane
describes the end of a relationship between a court woman and a higher-
ranking man and the woman’s flight to a nunnery as the relationship
disintegrates. It is written in a style reminiscent of Heian kana diaries by
women, like the Kagerō nikki (974) and the Izumi Shikibu nikki (c. 1008). It
opens with the narrator lamenting her fate, “Blinded by love, I was unfor-
tunately reckless, not knowing I would regret it so,” a theme that is carried
throughout the work.
Utatane draws heavily from The Tale of Genji by modeling the narrator on
the heroines Ukifune and Yūgao and uses tropes and poetic phrases from the
tale. Utatane contains descriptions of pilgrimages and a journey undertaken
with the narrator’s father to the eastern provinces, where she marvels at sites
like Hamana Bay and Mount Fuji: “Mount Fuji looked as though it were right
before me. The snow was very white and the smoke trailing on the wind was
moving, like something out of a dream.” At the diary’s conclusion, the author
has returned to the capital where she continues to reflect on the relationship

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with her lover, feeling “My heart grow darker as I reconsidered when I might
see him again.”
Utatane may have been based on Abutsu’s experiences at the court of
Princess Ankamon’in (1209–83), but she likely completed the work when she
had left the reclusion of a nunnery and was working for the poet Fujiwara no
Tameie (1198–1275). She may have produced the diary to prove her literary
talents as a poet and an expert of The Tale of Genji at a time when her
employment as an assistant was shifting into a romantic relationship.
Tameie eventually willed Abutsu’s sons much of his land and literary hold-
ings. After his death, these were withheld by his elder son by a previous wife,
leading Abutsu to travel to Kamakura and lodge a court case on her sons’
behalf. Having failed in the capital to secure the land rights for her sons she
writes, “I forgot various reservations and abandoned thoughts of myself.
Without foresight, I decided to set off, led by the moon of the sixteenth
night.” Guided by the light of the waning moon, she endures a two-week
journey to the warrior center of Kamakura.
Izayoi nikki is framed as a lament of her husband’s death, a record of her
duties as a filial wife and devoted mother, and a travelogue that documents
her journey to Kamakura and residence there. It is often read as an early
example of travel writing by women. The structure of Izayoi nikki can be
divided into four sections. The introduction explains the circumstances
surrounding the land claim, describes the preparations for Abutsu’s departure
to Kamakura, and includes a series of farewell poems. As she bids her family
and friends goodbye, she reasserts her case and justifies her journey. Abutsu
positions herself as a loyal wife and mother educating her sons in the Way of
Poetry following the instructions of her husband.
Waka no ura ni The briny seaweed
kaki todometaru raked together
moshiogusa at the Bay of Poetry,
kore o mukashi no consider it a memento
katami to wa miyo of the person of old.
The travel section records the journey from the capital to Kamakura. Abutsu
stops at shrines, where she prays for the successful outcome of the legal case, and
famous poetic sites such as Osaka Barrier, Hamana Bay, and Mount Fuji, where
she composes poems often linked to those of her husband’s family. At Fuji River
she emphasizes the sacrifice she has made for her children and her husband.

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Waga kodomo Were it not

kimi ni tsukaen for the sake of
tame naraba my children and my lord,
wataramashi ya wa would I be crossing you
Seki no Fujikawa Fuji River by the barrier?
The period of her residence in Kamakura is conveyed through a series of
exchanges with those in the capital, including members of the Kyōgoku
lineage and women serving at the court of Ankamon’in. Finally, some
versions of the diary include a chōka (long poem) that has been appended
to the text. This section justifies Abutsu’s position and underlines her despe-
rate state by restating her appeal in poetic form. Although the diary may not
have influenced the outcome of her court case, Abutsu’s descendants were
eventually awarded the land holdings and literary texts that she contested.

Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki (The Diary of Nakatsukasa

Naishi, c. 1292)
The Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki was written from 1280 to 1292 by Fujiwara no
Keishi (fl. c. 1252–c. 1292), a woman who served the Emperor Fushimi
(1265–1317, r. 1287–98) from when he was crown prince through when he
took the throne. It was likely composed as a memoir and tribute to her former
patron after she retired from service. The impermanence of life and the gloomy
state of present times are themes that wend their way through the diary and
imbue it with a quiet elegance. “As snow scattered under the full moon of the
fifteenth night, I was moved at the sight of the withered garden chilled by the
wind, but there was no one like-minded with whom I could share this.”
Compared with other autobiographical works of the medieval period, the
Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki strikes a balance between personal account and tribute
to the author’s patron. It documents relationships between the emperor and
key political and literary players who appear in other works, such as Lady
Nijō’s lover Saionji Sanekane (1249–1322) and members of the Kyōgoku lineage.
Although the author notes events of the court along with the date and
participating officials, she does not describe them with the same degree of
detail seen in works like the Ben no Naishi nikki, perhaps because they were
recorded retrospectively. Often an impressive event is recalled later in the work
as the author reflects on her current state and how times have changed.
Following the ascension of Emperor Fushimi, she notes a comment from
Lady Dainagon: “The clear reflection of the flowers in the pond by the
moonlight make me long for the past. As I tenderly recall times gone by and

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remember the friends who pledged not to forget, some of them are already
gone.” A sense of loss permeates the work, yet the author delights in the events
of the court and the beauties of the palace.
Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki can also be read as travel literature and a work that
contains the poetry of a new age. It describes trips undertaken to Amagasaki
and Hatsuse and makes references to famous poems on these sites. The work
includes 159 poems by the author, and others such as the Crown Prince
Fushimi and Kyōgoku Tamekane (1254–1332). The author also draws from
Sagoromo monogatari (The Tale of Sagoromo, late eleventh century), Yamato
monogatari (Tales of Yamato, c. 951), and tragic legends such as the story of the
Weaver Maiden (Vega) and her lover the Ox-herder (Altair) who are fated to
meet in the Milky Way only once a year. The author’s own romantic relation-
ships are elided, with the exception of various references to Minamoto no
Tomoakira (c. 1260–87), which suggest that they may have been lovers.

Towazugatari (The Unrequested Tale, c. 1306)

After its rediscovery in 1938, Towazugatari came to be seen as the last great
work of women’s autobiographical writing in the classical tradition. Its five
books span thirty-five years, documenting the author’s life at court through
Books One to Three and her travels in exile through Books Four and Five,
from the age of fourteen to forty-nine. Written in a style reminiscent of Heian
women’s diaries, it borrows heavily from themes and narrative tropes found
in The Tale of Genji, positioning Lady Nijō, the author of the work, first as
Murasaki and later as Genji himself.
Nijō was brought to the court of the Retired Emperor GoFukakusa as a
child and later served the emperor as a favored attendant (meshūdo). Her
status was ambivalent – neither consort nor simply a serving woman, she
bore the retired emperor a son who died as an infant. Nijō was backed at
court by her paternal and maternal families as well as her lover Saionji
Sanekane, known in the diary as Yuki no Akebono. She had a daughter
with Sanekane and later gave birth to two more children by GoFukakusa’s
brother, the Ninnaji Abbot Shōjo (1247–82; known as Ariake no Tsuki),
through a relationship seemingly condoned by her patron.
The first three books chronicle Nijō’s rise and eventual fall at court due to
lack of support, jealousies, and perhaps her efforts to seek alternate sources of
patronage from the regent Fujiwara (Takatsukasa) Kanehira (1228–94) and
GoFukakusa’s rival, his younger brother Kameyama (1249–1305, r. 1259–74).
The author echoes the style and content of romances, noting after her first

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sexual encounter with GoFukakusa that it “seemed like an episode from an

old tale” (Brazell, 10). While at court, she participates in archery contests and
a musical performance modeled on The Tale of Genji, with palace women
adopting specific roles as Genji heroines.
At the conclusion of the third book, Nijō has been sidelined by her rival at
court. The work then suddenly shifts to her journeys as a nun for the final
two books. The author writes of being influenced by famous travelers such as
the writers Saigyō (1118–90), Ariwara no Narihira (825–80), and Semimaru
(early Heian?), and the fictional hero Genji. Early in the diary, she notes, “I
had envied Saigyō’s life . . . and although I could never endure a life of ascetic
hardship, I wished that I could renounce this life and wander wherever my
feet might lead me . . . I obeyed my father, then I served my Lord, but my life
left something still to be desired” (52–3). In her exile from the palace, Nijō
fulfills this desire, traveling widely within Japan and meeting monks, nuns,
poets, priests, and prostitutes.
Knowledge of courtly culture made Nijō a valuable asset to elite warriors
in Kamakura, but she continued her religious travels rather than work for a
new patron. Towazugatari implies that her travels were motivated by political
factors at court, a desire to emulate Buddhist ideals, and aspirations as a travel
writer and a poet. She encounters GoFukakusa on two occasions during her
itinerancy, and he accuses her of having been unfaithful on the road, to which
she protests, “I swear to you that though I traveled eastward as far as the
Sumida River in Musashino, I did not so much as make a single night’s pledge
to any man” (222). Her past lover and patron remains in her thoughts and the
diary closes with Nijō reflecting on his passing: “After GoFukakusa’s death I
had felt as though there were no one with whom I could share my feel-
ings” (264).
The work incorporates aspects of a tale, travel record, and diary. It offers a
glimpse into the salons of the late thirteenth century and the influence of tale
literature on writing and the events of court life, documents the pleasures and
trials of travel, and shows the enduring qualities of classical women’s memoir
writing.

Takemukigaki (Record of One Facing the Bamboo,

c. 1349)
Takemukigaki was written during the disturbances leading into the
Nanbokuchō period (1336–92), when the Northern and Southern Courts
vied for authority. Composed by Hino Meishi (1310–58), it is divided into

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two volumes, the first covering the years 1329 to 1333 and the second 1337 to
1349. The diary focuses on Meishi’s service in the Northern (Jimyōin) Court,
her marriage to Saionji Kinmune (1310–35), the accomplishments of her son
Sanetoshi, and her journeys to temples and shrines. A backdrop to the diary is
the political instability that enveloped the court, the author’s family, and her
husband. Although we know from the Taiheiki (c. 1370s) that her husband was
beheaded after being accused of plotting against Emperor GoDaigo
(1288–1339, r. 1318–39), the diary elides overt references to the political machi-
nations of the era and the mayhem that surrounded the author. In Book One,
when Emperor Kōgon (1313–64, r. 1331–3) and retired emperors GoFushimi
(1288–1336, r. 1298–1301) and Hanazono (1297–1348, r. 1308–18) flee to
Rokuhara, she writes that those who remained “could only wander around
in a daze” and adds, “to avoid falsehoods, I have not sought to record this
further.”
The movement and shifts in residence by the emperors and by Meishi
herself, and her concern over securing and guarding the imperial regalia,
belie the calm exterior of the work. In addition to the unrest of the period, the
diary depicts the change in marriage patterns from “wife-visiting” to “bride-
taking” practices, the significance of motherhood as a source of authority for
women, and a heightened awareness of lineage and familial traditions.
Takemukigaki is often cited as the work concluding the four-hundred-year
tradition of women’s memoirs beginning with the Kagerō nikki. Later diaries
may have simply been lost, but the contexts for women’s writing appear to
have changed. Shifts in patronage, marriage, and inheritance practices, the
development of the patriarchal household unit, and the general decline of
court culture and influence resulted in fewer opportunities for women’s
writing. Women’s cultural contributions carried on through other forms,
including travel writing, a genre in which they would play an important role
in the centuries that followed.
Many of the above works include extensive descriptions of journeys. Ben
no Naishi and Nakatsukasa Naishi frequently accompany their patrons on
excursions or take time off for their own pilgrimages. Utatane shows how
travel was used as an escape from court life or as a means of demanding
attention from a reticent lover. The toil of travel is indicated in the author’s
journey through the night to a nunnery: “The pouring rain mingled with the
tears darkening my eyes and I could no longer see the way I had come nor my
destination. There were no words for my feelings. Drenched to the bone,
with my life soon to be over, I felt worse than the diver of Ise.” Lady Nijō
notes her fatigue at being “weary and lonely from the days I had spent in

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unaccustomed travel” (Brazell, 182). When she meets GoFukakusa he out-

lines the challenges faced by women on the road: “A man is more or less free
to travel eastward or even to China, but there are so many hindrances for a
traveling woman that I understand it to be impossible” (221). Despite the
danger and discomfort of journeys, and the impediment of being female,
noblewomen continued to record the drudgery and joys of travel. Their
diaries show that excursions to religious sites or to retrace the footsteps of
past poets offered a fresh perspective from court life and new fodder for
writing.

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 28
Setsuwa (anecdotal) literature: Nihon
ryōiki to Kokon chomonjū
haruo shirane

Setsuwa (anecdotes), a modern term that literally means “spoken story,”

refers to stories that have been orally narrated and then written down.
These recorded stories were often used for oral storytelling, resulting in
new variations, which were again recorded. The result is that setsuwa
frequently exist in multiple variants, with the story usually evolving over
time or serving different purposes. In being told, written down, retold, and
rewritten, these setsuwa presume a narrator and a listener, but not necessa-
rily a specific author. Setsuwa in this sense began as early as the ancient
period, with the fudoki, or local gazetteers, which gathered oral stories from
the provinces and recorded them in kanbun (Literary Sinitic). Setsuwa as
spoken-and-heard narration was stressed by Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), the
founder of minzokugaku or folklore studies in Japan, who sought out “litera-
ture before the written word” and who was influential in the modern
reevaluation of the genre. However, premodern setsuwa survive only in
written form, sometimes in kanbun prose, providing a glimpse of the story-
telling process but never reproducing it.
The following setsuwa, titled “On Mercilessly Skinning a Live Rabbit and
Receiving an Immediate Penalty” (1–16), appears in the Nihon ryōiki (Record
of Miraculous Events in Japan, c. 787–824), a setsuwa collection in kanbun:
In Yamato province there lived a man whose name and native village are
unknown. He was by nature merciless and loved to kill living creatures. He
once caught a rabbit, skinned it live, and then turned it loose in the fields. But
not long afterward, pestilent sores broke out all over his body, his whole
body was covered with scabs, and these caused him unspeakable torment. In
the end he never gained any relief, but died groaning and lamenting.
Ah, how soon do such deeds receive an immediate penalty! We should
consider others as we do ourselves, exercise benevolence, and never be
without pity and compassion!

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In a manner typical of the genre, the setsuwa is compactly written, plot-

driven, turns on an element of surprise or wonder, and is didactic (teaching
karmic retribution and benevolence). The setsuwa in the Nihon ryōiki were
probably collected and edited as a sourcebook for sermons by Buddhist
priests who preached to audiences that, for the most part, could not read
kanbun and who were captivated by the “wondrous” (or miraculous) aspect
of the narrative. Often the same setsuwa will appear with a different ending
in another collection, reflecting its range of usage.
The setsuwa-shū, or collection of setsuwa, a written genre with its own
structure and conventions, was inspired in part by Chinese encyclopedias
(leishu). In contrast to the setsuwa, which had its roots in oral storytelling, the
setsuwa-shū was a literary form that provided a structured worldview and
that categorized that world into different spheres and topics. For example,
Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, c. 1120), which contains
close to a thousand stories, divides the world into India, China, and Japan,
and separates Japan into Buddhist and secular spheres, with the latter being
further divided into secular topics such as “warriors,” “poetry,” “thieves,” and
“humor.” The first extant setsuwa collection is the aforementioned Nihon
ryōiki (c. 787–824), a Buddhist collection edited and compiled in the early
Heian period. Although we sometimes know the editors, such as Priest Mujū,
the editor of Shasekishū (Tales of Sand and Pebbles), the setsuwa stories
themselves are anonymous. In short, there are three key elements to under-
standing setsuwa: the act of narration (the storytelling), the act of writing
(recording the story or rewriting an earlier setsuwa), and the editing of the
collection, which brings together the stories in some order.
In late Heian and medieval aristocratic society, when hereditary family
schools were established in fields such as waka and music, the secrets of the
family school were passed from teacher to disciple or from family head to the
successor via kuden, or “secret transmissions.” When the line of transmission
faced the danger of extinction, the oral transmissions were often written
down in the form of setsuwa in an attempt to preserve the knowledge of the
school. In the late Heian period this resulted in the Gōdanshō (Ōe
Conversations, c. 1108), a setsuwa collection that records stories narrated by
Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111), one of the leading scholars and poets of the time.
In 1111, Masafusa, at the age of seventy, fearing that the Ōe lineage would
disappear with his death, narrated the family secrets to his top disciple
Fujiwara Sanekane (1085–1112), who took notes, referred to as kikigaki (lit-
erally, listen and write down) or lecture notes. The Gōdanshō takes the form
of a dialogue between the narrator and the listener. This kind of setsuwa,

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which emerged in the late Heian period, was the product of an age in which
the transmission of knowledge of aristocratic culture and its historical pre-
cedents was held in high esteem but was quickly fading away as the aristoc-
racy fell from power. In this regard, setsuwa can be regarded as a form of
topical history, a history that is narrated before it is written down.
The systematic attempt to provide knowledge of the past, particularly of
the aristocratic past, is evident in Kokon chomonjū (A Collection of Things
Written and Heard in the Past and Present), which was edited around 1254 by
Tachibana Narisue, a low-ranking aristocrat and literatus who received the
secret transmission on playing the lute. In the preface, Narisue asserts that
this collection begins where the now-lost Uji dainagon monogatari (Tales by
the Major Counselor of Uji), a premodern setsuwa collection, left off, and is
intended to augment the official histories. The collection, whose structure
shows the influence of Chinese encyclopedias, covers a variety of topics,
beginning with such topics as Shinto, Buddhism, government, court matters,
Chinese literature, classical poetry, and calligraphy, and ending with plants
and trees (section 29) and fish, insects, and animals (section 30).
In contrast to the narrational setting of the Gōdanshō, which was based on a
vertical teacher–disciple relationship, other setsuwa were born out of an
open relationship among people from different backgrounds, from com-
moners to samurai to aristocrats, who gathered to tell or hear stories. This
was probably the setting that resulted in setsuwa like the one called “How the
Demon of Agi Bridge in Ōmi Province Eats Somebody” (27: 13), which
appears in the twenty-seventh book of the Konjaku monogatari shū. These
kinds of stories about demons probably had no particular value for a given
family or profession, but they were of great interest to those who heard them,
and the twenty-seventh book, which is devoted to “demon” or oni stories,
provides a systematic glimpse into this aspect of the world.
Storytelling in the Heian and medieval periods took various forms. One
type was the “round-table” format, referred to as meguri-monogatari or jun-no-
monogatari (tales in order), in which participants would take turns telling
stories, often with a listener who was an aristocrat who could write. In the
preface to the Uji shūi monogatari (Collection of Tales from Uji), the Major
Counselor of Uji, Minamoto Takakuni, resting near the Byōdō-in Temple
at Uji, south of the capital (present-day Kyoto), calls out to passers-by and
has them tell their stories. The Uji shūi monogatari can be said to be
Takakuni’s kikigaki or lecture notes on what he had heard by the roadside.
This format even pervades the court literature of the Heian period. The
Ōkagami (The Great Mirror), a history written in vernacular Japanese that

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describes the age of Fujiwara regents and the rise of Fujiwara Michinaga,
similarly begins on a rainy evening when nobles gather before the retired
emperor Kazan to tell their stories. Frequently the storytellers gather in the
evening and tell stories into the morning in a pattern called tsuya-monogatari
(all-night tales). This custom of round-table or all-night storytelling continues
into the Edo period and results in such customs as the hyaku monogatari
(hundred tales), in which each participant tells a ghost story and at the end the
candle is blown out, allowing a “real” ghost to appear.
Since one of the objectives of setsuwa collections such as the late Heian
period Konjaku monogatari shū or the Muromachi period Sangoku denki
(Transmissions from Three Countries, early fifteenth century), edited by
Gentō, was to provide an encyclopedic worldview, centered on India,
China, and Japan, these collections included stories from these three coun-
tries. The Kara monogatari (Tales of China, c. 1165), a late-Heian period
setsuwa anthology perhaps edited by Fujiwara Shigenori (1135–88), is a
collection of poem-tale (uta-monogatari) style adaptations from Chinese
texts such as Shiji (Historical Records, J. Shiki), Hanshu (History of the Han,
J. Hansho), Meng qiu (J. Mōgyū), and Baishi wenji (Collected Works of Bo Juyi
[or Bai Juyi], J. Hakushi monjū or Hakushi bunshū, 839). In Sangoku denki, a
Buddhist priest from India, a Chinese layperson, and a person from Japan tell
stories about their respective countries. The Chinese had already translated
parts of Buddhist scriptures and stories from Sanskrit into Chinese, and these
were then transmitted to Japan. These translations from the Chinese were in
turn orally narrated and written down again. The tales of India and China in
the Konjaku monogatari shū are stories that had already been circulated and
narrated before being recorded and often differ significantly from their
Chinese sources. Given the nature of setsuwa, which was not concerned
with the notion of an authentic original text, these kinds of setsuwa are best
called free adaptations. Japanese knowledge of Chinese historical figures and
legends as they appear in medieval warrior tales such as The Tales of the Heike
was often derived from such setsuwa rather than from the primary texts in
Chinese.
The language and style of setsuwa are diverse. The first setsuwa collection,
the Nihon ryōiki, was written in hentai kanbun (literally, unorthodox Chinese).
The Konjaku monogatari shū was written in a compact, highly efficient Sino-
Japanese style, called wakan-konkōbun, that mixes Chinese graphs with kata-
kana, a native syllabary associated with Buddhist writing. The Uji shūi
monogatari uses hiragana, in a more classical style that draws on the mono-
gatari (court tale) tradition. The Sangoku denki is written in kanbun, or

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Literary Sinitic. These texts, which reveal a wide range of written styles,
cannot be said to be direct recordings of oral performances.
In the Heian period, setsuwa were regarded by Buddhist priests as a means
of spreading Buddhism and making it accessible to an audience that could not
read Buddhist scriptures. This partially accounts for the large number of
Buddhist-centered setsuwa collections in the late Heian and early Kamakura
periods. The editors of such collections as the Konjaku monogatari shū were
interested in China and India not only because they wanted to present a
world history but because Buddhism spread from India through China to
Japan. With the rise of Zen Buddhism in the Kamakura period and the
emergence of Buddhist leaders such as Eisai (1141–1215), the Rinzai Zen leader,
and Dōgen (1200–53), the Sōtō Zen pioneer, who stressed enlightenment
without words and beyond language, the Buddhist attitude toward setsuwa
as a means of religious education changed, and setsuwa were sometimes
banned as a means of teaching.
Setsuwa collections embraced a wide variety of topics, from poetry to
violence to sex and humor, and their contents range from folktales about
animals and plants to historical legends to myths about gods to accounts of
everyday commoner life to stories of the supernatural. If there is a common
denominator in this huge variety it is the attempt by the editor to provide a
comprehensive vision of the world and a means of surviving in that world.
The readers/listeners were expected to go away having learned a “lesson”
about some aspect of life. This is apparent in the predilection for didactic
endings, particularly prominent in the Buddhist collections, which were
attempting to spread the Buddhist gospel or to stress the efficacy of the
Lotus Sutra or the power of the Kannon bodhisattva. The setsuwa often end
with what are now called kotowaza, aphorisms that provide guidance in
navigating life. For example, a story from the Nihon ryōiki (3: 26) ends with
the phrase “Those who fail to repay debts that they owe will atone for this by
becoming a horse or an ox.” An example of a modern aphorism is akuin akka
(bad cause, bad results), which means something like “you reap what you
sow” and which derives from the Buddhist notion of karmic retribution. The
use of stories that have been heard or circulated for pedagogical purposes also
appears in medieval zuihitsu, or free-form essays, such as Priest Kenkō’s
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, c. 1331), some of which closely resemble a
setsuwa collection.
Another major characteristic of setsuwa was that it was not confined to the
world of the court and aristocracy in the way that contemporary Heian court
tales and classical poetry tended to be. Setsuwa embraced a wide range of

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social groups, ranging from commoners, warriors, and priests to aristocrats.

The Konjaku monogatari shū, compiled in the twelfth century, provides one of
the first collections of stories of warriors, who were emerging as a new social
class. These setsuwa collections also explore the underworld of thieves,
pirates, and social deviants. When compared to early chronicles such as the
Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720) or late Heian and Kamakura vernacular
histories such as the Ōkagami or Masukagami (The Clear Mirror), which
focused on the imperial line, the Fujiwara regency, or retired emperors, the
setsuwa collections give a broader view of the underside of society.
Setsuwa also deal with the divine (gods), with the supernatural (ghosts,
demons, long-nosed tengu, and other-worldly beings), and with the world of
dreams, which were thought to provide access to the other world, to those
not immediately or physically present, such as the spirits of the dead and
gods. Significantly, the storytelling scene in setsuwa is often set near or at a
temple or shrine, where the narrators have readier access to divine spirits.
The setsuwa collections dealt with both foreign worlds and the worlds of the
dead, the divine, and the supernatural. In a related fashion, they also provide
access to worlds of the taboo or the erotic, often through dreams, visions, and
supernatural encounters. In the Konjaku monogatari shū, for example, snakes,
which had appeared earlier in the Nihon shoki as gods (for example, the god of
Mount Miwa), appear as evil serpents and often as phallic symbols. However,
in contrast to Heian period monogatari such as The Tale of Genji, which admit
to their fictionality, setsuwa present the narration as history, as a faithful
record of past events, even when these events are strange or miraculous. In
the medieval and Tokugawa periods, setsuwa collections were often con-
sidered to be a kind of historical record or a type of hōgo, vernacular Buddhist
writing.
Setsuwa differ from monogatari and military chronicles in their brevity,
rarely extending beyond five or six pages. They tend to be action-oriented,
plot-centered, externally descriptive, and compact, often focusing on a single
event or limited chain of events. Setsuwa collections, by contrast, can be very
large, such as Konjaku monogatari shū, with over a thousand tales; have
complex thematic structures; and attempt to be comprehensive and historical
in coverage. Like the poems in a poetry anthology, the individual setsuwa can
thus be read both independently and as part of a thematic cluster within a
book (maki), in which each story is a variation on a theme such as “Kannon,”
“Humor,” or “Demons.” Furthermore, within each book successive tales are
often linked by a shared topic or motif.

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In the late medieval period, the setsuwa genre was overshadowed by a

new genre, the otogi-zōshi, or Muromachi tale, which was a longer narrative
form that incorporated elements of the Heian court tale and drew on many of
the same sources as the setsuwa collections. The setsuwa collections, how-
ever, saw new life in the Edo period when they were printed for the first time,
widely read, and compiled anew. Throughout its history, the setsuwa pro-
vided a constant and deep source of material for other genres, such as the
nikki (literary diary), monogatari, gunki-mono (warrior tales), historical
chronicles, noh drama, kōwakamai (ballad drama), kyōgen (comic theater),
otogi-zōshi, and sekkyō-bushi (sermon ballads). A closely related genre is the
warrior tale (such as The Tales of the Heike), which often integrates various
shorter setsuwa into a longer chronological narrative that traces the arc of a
particular war.
In contrast to Heian period waka and Heian monogatari, a number of
which were canonized in the late Heian period, the setsuwa collections were
not considered literature but a kind of secondary history for most of the
premodern period and were not the object of commentary. The Uji shūi
monogatari became popular in the Edo period, but the Konjaku monogatari shū
appears to have been totally neglected until the modern period. It was not
until the twentieth century, when the setsuwa collections drew the attention
of modern novelists such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), who adapted
and combined the setsuwa in such noted modern short stories as “Hana”
(Nose) and “Rashōmon,” that works such as the Konjaku monogatari shū
became part of the Japanese literary canon and were referred to as setsuwa
bungaku, or anecdotal literature. Because of their interest in commoner life,
Uji shūi monogatari and Konjaku monogatari shū became particularly popular
after World War II period, when Japanese literature was “democratized” and
curricular attention was shifted away from medieval war tales.

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 29
The rise of medieval warrior tales: Hōgen
monogatari and Heiji monogatari
elizabeth oyler

The twelfth century witnessed a series of remarkable events whose historical

significance was only fully assimilated in later centuries. Although histories
and diaries recorded them, they entered the historical memory most fully as
the subjects of a group of narratives collectively known as gunki monogatari
(war tales) or ikusa monogatari (tales of battle) today. The war tales represent a
new development in narrative, bringing warriors to the fore as subjects and
making events that occurred in the provinces politically relevant. They
embraced forms that ranged from written record to recited requiem, often
within one text, and their actual and fictional characters and situations
became the stock from which the medieval cultural consciousness – one
that celebrated and lamented warriors and warfare – was created.
In 1156, disputes within the royal house and the regental Fujiwara clan led
to the brief Hōgen uprising in the capital. The incident split loyalties in both
of these families, as well as in two mid-ranking clans that had served for
generations in important military positions: the Minamoto (or Genji) and the
Taira (or Heike).1 The uprising was instigated by the retired sovereign Sutoku
(1119–64), who had been forced to abdicate the throne by his father, retired
sovereign Toba (1103–56), in favor of his half-brother Konoe (1139–55). Konoe
died shortly after ascending the throne and was replaced by a much younger
brother, GoShirakawa (1125–92); Sutoku believed that the throne should have
returned to his line.
Following their father’s death, Sutoku sought to reclaim the throne for
himself or his son, and called on Fujiwara no Yorinaga (1120–56) and members
1
Genji is the Sino-Japanese reading for the characters for “the Minamoto clan,” Heike for
“the house of the Taira.” The two sets of terms are used interchangeably in works
describing this period. Both clans descended originally from princes of the blood who
were reduced to commoner status and given positions in the provinces, where their
descendants gradually amassed wealth and/or the support of local landholders. Their
relationship to the throne is therefore somewhat complex: they are at once closer than
other clans and yet also more formally removed.

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of the Taira and Minamoto clans to support him. The Minamoto scion,
Tameyoshi (1096–1156), and all but one of his sons came to his aid:
Tameyoshi’s eldest son and heir, Yoshitomo (1123–60), sided against him.
The Taira scion, Kiyomori (1118–81), joined Yoshitomo in supporting
GoShirakawa. A night attack on Sutoku’s Shirakawa mansion brought the
conflict to a swift conclusion, despite the heroic efforts of, most notably,
Tameyoshi’s son Tametomo, an unruly but courageous warrior. Yorinaga
was killed in battle, Sutoku was sent into exile, and their champions from the
Minamoto and Taira clans were sentenced to execution by the winning
generals. Being responsible for executing his brothers and father was a
particularly harsh fate for Yoshitomo.
In the ensuing years, Kiyomori flourished, while Yoshitomo did not, and in
1159 the disgruntled Yoshitomo took up arms against Kiyomori in what is
known as the Heiji uprising. Provoked by schisms in the regental house, this
conflict pitted two sons of Fujiwara no Tadazane (1078–1162), Shinzei (1106–
60) and his much younger brother Nobuyori (1133–60), against each other.
Nobuyori rallied Yoshitomo to attack and kill Shinzei, while Kiyomori, who
supported Shinzei, was away on pilgrimage. The Minamoto then moved to
attack the Taira mansion at Rokuhara, but were roundly defeated.
Yoshitomo and all his adult male children either died in battle or were
executed. His five youngest sons – still children at the time – were sent to
temples or into exile to effectively neuter the line.
Kiyomori parlayed this victory into higher and higher political positions,
eventually being named chancellor and marrying a daughter to the reigning
sovereign, Takakura (1168–80), in imitation of generations of Fujiwara men
before him. Kiyomori’s daughter gave birth to a son, who was immediately
named crown prince and ascended the throne as the sovereign Antoku
(1178–85) when he was two years old. Takakura died shortly thereafter.
The political instability in the capital that served as the backdrop to these
uprisings continued to spread, and, in 1180, three of the youngest sons of
Yoshitomo rose against the Taira with the tacit support of the retired
sovereign, GoShirakawa (father of Takakura and grandfather of Antoku).
For five years, the two sides fought off and on in what is known as the Genpei
War, with the Minamoto forces accruing victories as the Taira were driven
first out of the capital and eventually to the western edge of the realm. The
final battle between the two was fought at sea, in the straits off Dan-no-Ura
(present-day Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture). It was an overwhelming
victory for the Minamoto and a devastating loss for the Taira: all Kiyomori’s
offspring died or were captured, and Kiyomori’s eight-year-old grandson, the

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sovereign Antoku whom the Taira had taken with them as they fled the
capital, drowned in the arms of his grandmother, Kiyomori’s widow, who
also carried with her to the bottom of the sea the sword that was one of the
three royal regalia.
Following the war, the Minamoto victor Yoritomo (1147–99) established a
bureau of warrior affairs in the remote village of Kamakura (near present-day
Tokyo), from which he and successive shoguns oversaw military affairs,
including problems concerning deputies and land stewards placed as
Kamakura’s representatives in provincial offices and on estates around the
realm. By the turn of the thirteenth century, the political and social landscape
was decidedly altered in the eyes of aristocrats and the emergent military class.
Again in 1221, an armed conflict known to posterity as the Jōkyū uprising
broke out between the retired sovereign GoToba (1180–1239) and the
Kamakura shogunate. Although Yoritomo had solidly controlled the position
of shogun while alive, within a generation his line was extinguished by the
assassination of his son Sanetomo (1192–1219), the third shogun, in 1219.
Following the death of Yoritomo, his wife Hōjō Masako’s (1156–1225) father,
Tokimasa (1138–1215, and then brother, Yoshitoki (1163–1224), served as
regents to his sons Yoriie (1182–1204) and then Sanetomo, both of whom
were killed while serving as shogun. With Sanetomo’s death, Yoshitoki
appointed a young son from the Fujiwara family, Kujō Yoritsune (1218–56),
to serve as shogun. The Jōkyū uprising witnessed GoToba trying to wrest
power from the Hōjō. His forces were roundly defeated, and he and two of
his sons were sent into exile.
Fifty years later, the external threat of the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281
impelled the shogunate to extend itself both militarily and financially to protect
the western reaches of the realm. Although the attackers were repelled, the
shogunate was severely weakened, and it was toppled by the Ashikaga, a
branch house of the Minamoto, in the Kenmu Restoration of 1333–6.
The medieval war tales narrate these conflicts and problems connected to
them. The features defining a “war tale” are fairly amorphous, and it is
impossible to consider the group of works that comprise the category as a
single “genre.” In general, war tales describe historical warfare and the lives
of warriors and the people close to them. The main characters are heroic and
often take on the hyperbolic dimensions that served as the basis for early
comparisons to Western epic traditions. Although they are presented as – and
were through the early modern period considered to be – historical records,
they are often episodic and stylistically owe a debt to both setsuwa and
monogatari traditions.

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Most war tales appear in a number of variant lines, some of which were
intended to be read, and some of which bear strong markers of oral composi-
tion, transmission, and performance. It is impossible to easily identify an
author for any of these works, and most are thought to be the product of
accretion over decades or even centuries, as in the case of Heike monogatari
(The Tales of the Heike), the most famous war tale (treated separately in this
volume). Recitational variants of the Heike were performed by biwa hōshi,
blind male reciters who accompanied themselves on the biwa, a four-stringed
Japanese lute, and we believe this is the case for two other early medieval war
tales as well: Hōgen monogatari (The Tale of the Disturbance in the Hōgen
Era) and Heiji monogatari (The Tale of the Disturbance in the Heiji Era). Some
variants of the later Soga monogatari seem to have been in the custodianship of
itinerant female narrators known as goze.
The role of performers as creators of the war tales differentiates this corpus
from earlier tales and the late Heian histories. As part of performance
traditions, they were shaped by multiple artists addressing varied audience
expectations and cultural contexts. Perhaps consequently, many war tales are
framed by a fairly clear worldview, often Buddhist or Neo-Confucian, that is
frequently articulated in a prologue or in the opening episode as well as the
conclusion of the work. The language of the war tales usually involves a
mixture of Chinese and Japanese vocabulary and diction and a hybrid form
accommodating prose narrative, lyric, and the quotation of documents. Even
in the works most clearly indebted to oral contexts for composition and
performance, the written tradition and its role in recording historical events
was always present: throughout the tales, their function as records is reflected
in hints at stylistic markers of history, including significant use of Chinese
vocabulary and syntax; a clear sense of chronology (and sometimes a clearly
outlined chronological format); and naming practices linked to record keep-
ing, including the use of -ki (record) in titles of many of the works from
early on.
Although the most influential war tales took form and circulated after the
Genpei War, antecedents can be found in late Heian works including
Shōmonki (Record of Masakado’s Uprising) and Mutsuwaki (Record of the
Battles in the North). The first describes an attempt by Taira Masakado, a
provincial member of the Taira clan, to aggrandize power in the eastern
provinces during the middle decades of the the tenth century. The latter
describes Minamoto Yoriyoshi’s subjugation of the Abe clan in what is now
the Tohoku region during the mid eleventh century. Both works were
written shortly after the conflicts they describe, and both concern events

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that took place far from the capital. Shōmonki uses hentai kanbun (a writing
style reliant primarily on Chinese characters and syntax) and is presented as a
historical record, but its valorization of the protagonist – the doomed rebel
Masakado, eventually subdued and killed in 940 – foreshadows the character-
ization of later heroes (particularly doomed ones) who populate many
medieval war tales.
Mutsuwaki, also written in kanbun, is an important antecedent for the early
medieval tales, as it glorifies ancestors whom early medieval war tales would
venerate as appropriate forebears for the men who won the Genpei War and
established the Kamakura shogunate. Although based on records of a pro-
longed conflict, the tale includes significant embellishment and interest in the
personalities on both sides, a characteristic suggesting reliance on oral story-
telling and setsuwa and reflecting a general trend in historical writing in the
late Heian period toward hybridization of style and voice. These Heian
period works helped open narrative terrain that would be mined in the
Heike and beyond: warriors could be actors, and the provinces could repre-
sent a locale for significant political and cultural activity.
The earliest of the medieval war tales are the group describing the causes
and effects of the Genpei War: Hōgen monogatari, Heiji monogatari, and Heike
monogatari. Together with Jōkyūki (Record of the Jōkyū Rebellion), these tales
concerning the formative years of the Kamakura period were sometimes
considered as a four-part set that together narrates the consolidation of power
under the Kamakura shogunate. Scholars often pair Hōgen monogatari and
Heiji monogatari because of their connected storylines, characters, and shared
compositional and reception histories. Both tales consist of three maki (chap-
ters), and both seem to have been written after the Genpei War, as they open
with statements pointing toward a shared endpoint and anticipate the events
of the 1170s and 1180s as the destination of their narratives. Their authorship
and dates of composition are unknown, although there are records of
performances of Hōgen, Heiji, and Heike monogatari by biwa hōshi dating
from the thirteenth century. It is impossible to tell how similar the versions
performed at that time were to the texts extant today, but, like performed
variants of the Heike monogatari, episodes within each chapter are given
descriptive titles. In addition to tracing a history involving many of the
same characters, Hōgen and Heiji monogatari also suggest their concomitant
development stylistically and thematically. In each, one (doomed) Minamoto
son becomes a central figure and object of sympathy. In Hōgen, it is the
rebellious but brave Tametomo, Tameyoshi’s ninth son, and in Heiji it is
Yoshitomo’s heir, Yoshihira. Taira Kiyomori is the historical character at the

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heart of all three tales, which together narrate his rise and fall in terms of his
antagonistic relationship with the Minamoto clan.
Hōgen and Heiji monogatari appear in numerous texts treated as represen-
tative of variant lines (approximately five for Hōgen and eleven for Heiji)
whose dates of composition range from the early thirteenth through fifteenth
centuries. The primary language used across these variants is the mixed Sino-
Japanese style, wakan-konkōbun, employed in many medieval texts: kana is the
primary script, but both Chinese and kanbun expressions and residues appear
in varying degrees. The oldest text of Hōgen monogatari, referred to as the
Bunpo-bon (Bunpo variant), dates to 1318, but only the second of its three
chapters is extant. Scholars believe, however, that there may have been a
version or versions that served as the basis for extant texts circulating as early
as the early thirteenth century. The Nakarai-bon seems to reflect an early
version similar to the Bunpo-bon, although no early texts exist. Heiji mono-
gatari is thought to have been circulating in some form from about the same
period, but the earliest texts are incomplete. It also exists in fragmentary form
as an illustrated text (emaki) from the thirteenth century.
Although it is difficult to determine a genealogy for the variant lines of
either tale, the texts thought to be the oldest tend to be less censorious of
Kiyomori, while later variants reflect a characterization for him more in
keeping with that in the Heike, suggesting a trend toward a cohesive narrative
across the three tales. Whereas early variants of Hōgen tend to vilify Kiyomori
less and stress the great wisdom of Shinzei, later variants stress Tametomo’s
heroics and include longer narratives about his exile to Ōshima after the
conflict. Although early variants devote less narrative than later ones to
ascribing historical significance to the events they describe, they tend to be
more accurate in dating and description than later works. Not surprisingly,
the later versions – with clearer characterizations and storylines probably
shaped by the biwa hōshi – are those that became the basis for printed
editions in the Edo period and seem to have been the best known, including
the Hōtoku-bon Hōgen monogatari, of 1415, the oldest complete manuscript of
that tale, and the Kotohira-bon Heiji monogatari.
The role of performers in forming these early gunki monogatari about late
Heian conflicts marks a departure from earlier literary traditions and under-
lines the importance of oral narrative traditions including setsuwa and shōdō
(preaching) in the creation of the tales as they were passed down through the
generations. All three works include episodes found also in setsuwa collec-
tions and adopt at least sporadically a voice reminiscent of the narrator’s in
setsuwa. Additionally, however, these three war tales in performance also

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incorporated musical accompaniment on the biwa lute, which added impor-

tant ritual and musical dimensions.
The precise development of the performance tradition (with the Heike
monogatari at the center) is a matter of scholarly debate, but it apparently
grew out of shōmyō (liturgical chant) from Tendai and Shingon practice and
itinerant performance of narratives about battles. The biwa had long been
associated with ritual performance, and its use in recitation of the war tales is
conventionally considered to reflect the ritual aspect of performance of the
tales: to soothe the spirits of the restless dead killed on the battlefield. The
importance of chinkon (pacification of spirits) in the tales – and particularly
the Hōgen, Heiji, Heike cycle – is regularly emphasized in scholarship.
Recitation of the tales, therefore, puts to rest the spirits of the dead by
resurrecting them in narrative as larger-than-life characters.
The importance of textual variation and of different reception contexts for
variant texts is an issue central to understanding the complex cultural mean-
ing of Heike monogatari. Extant today in some eighty texts, its variants are
generally divided into two broad categories, those intended to be read (the
“read lineage,” or yomihon-kei) and those intended to be recited (the “recited
lineage,” or kataribon-kei). Although it is apparent that Hōgen and Heiji were
part of the repertoire of the biwa hōshi associated with the recitational line
Heike texts, the performance history of extant texts of these two shorter
works is harder to trace. And indeed although Heike texts are categorized
broadly as “read” or “recited,” both groups were always circulating in
contexts where their shared stories, amplifications, and contradictions were
known to readers and audiences and together contributed to the historical
consciousness of the period they described. All were, in other words, histories
of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods, even as they were entertaining
stories of epic heroes and requiems for the war dead.
Also developing during the thirteenth century was Jōkyūki, a work describ-
ing retired sovereign GoToba’s unsuccessful attempt to rein in the power of
the Kamakura shogunate. Extant in four textual lines, it consists of two
chapters. The oldest text, the Maeda-bon, dates from the late thirteenth
century. The Jikyōji-bon, a later copy, seems to reflect an earlier version of
the tale, perhaps with later embellishments to its beginning and end that help
connect it to the works treated above. In Jōkyūki we find no named episodes
within the chapters, a stylistic feature that separates it from other military
tales.
Jōkyūki commemorates the losers of the brief Jōkyū conflict. Its heroes are
GoToba’s champions, including Miura Taneyoshi and Yamada Sanesada. It is

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often considered as the conclusion to the four-part cycle initiated with the
events described in Hōgen monogatari. The shogunate’s suppression of
GoToba’s uprising in 1221 is portrayed as an endpoint demonstrating the
righteousness and the might of the Kamakura shogunate even as it laments
the loss of brave partisans of the throne.

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 30
The Tales of the Heike
david t. bialock

The Heike monogatari (The Tales of the Heike) is a long medieval narrative,
extant in multiple variants, about the rise and fall of Taira Kiyomori (1118–81)
and the Heike warrior house in the course of the twelfth century. The events
narrated span nearly seventy years, from 1131, the date of Taira Tadamori’s
unprecedented admission to the Courtiers Hall, to 1199, the year in which the
last male Heike heir, Rokudai, was executed upon orders of Minamoto
Yoritomo (1147–99), the leader of the rival Genji warrior house and founder
of the Kamakura bakufu. If the Heike may be said to have one overarching
theme, it is the Buddhist principle of impermanence (mujō) announced in the
celebrated preface:
The sound of the bells of Gion Shōja echo the impermanence of all things;
the color of the sala flowers reveals how all that flourishes must decline. The
arrogant do not last long; they are like the dream of a spring night. The fierce,
too, perish in the end; they are like dust before the wind.

Found with little variation in all versions of the Heike, this admonition threads
through the entire work. Along with the doctrine of karmic retribution
(inga ōhō), or the principle that wrong actions are paid for in the future, it
helps to give the narrative its distinctive Buddhist coloring.
If there is a plot to the Heike’s largely episodic narrative structure, it is
in the story of the rise and fall of the Heike family that begins and ends
the narrative. The first three scrolls narrate the rapid rise and consolida-
tion of Kiyomori’s power, alternating praise with censure. In scroll 1, for
example, “Suzuki” (The Sea Bass) and “Waga mi no eiga” (Kiyomori’s
Flowering Fortunes) celebrate the Heike’s miraculous successes, while
“Giō,” with its story of Kiyomori’s cruel treatment of the famed shirabyō-
shi dancers Giō and Hotoke, already foreshadows his eventual destruction.
When Kiyomori’s daughter Kenreimon’in gives birth to the Taira emperor
Antoku in the episode “Gosan” (The Imperial Lying-In) at the beginning

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of scroll 3, Kiyomori’s fortunes and political power are seemingly secured

for years to come. But the cruel death of Shunkan in scroll 3, punished
with exile for his plot against Kiyomori, followed immediately by an
ominous whirlwind (tsujikaze) that destroys much of the capital, and
next by the unexpected death of Kiyomori’s eldest son, the virtuous
Shigemori, already signal a change of fortune. In scrolls 4 through 6, the
ominous signs now give way to the series of events that will quickly bring
about Kiyomori’s and the Heike’s destruction. The first is Prince
Mochihito’s failed military rebellion to reclaim the imperial throne from
the Taira that is narrated in “Hashi gassen” (The Battle at the Bridge) in
scroll 4, followed by the burning of Miidera. In scroll 5, Kiyomori commits
his most outrageous act by transferring the court from its four-hundred-
year seat in the Heian capital to an unpropitious site at Fukuhara. In the
Kakuichi-bon (Kakuichi variant), the version of the Heike that has achieved
canonical status in modern times, this action coincides with news of
Yoritomo’s military uprising against the Heike in the East. Echoing the
fiery destruction of the Imperial Palace at the end of scroll 1, and of
Miidera at the end of scroll 4, scroll 5 ends with the complete destruction
of the Nara temples by Kiyomori’s son Shigehira. Scroll 6 brings the arc of
Kiyomori’s rise to a violent end with the long description of his excruciat-
ingly painful death, a vivid instance of karmic retribution.
The second half of the Heike narrates the defeat of the Heike by the Genji
forces, first led by Kiso no Yoshinaka, who drives the Heike into flight and
exile from the capital (scroll 7); and then by Minamoto no Yoshitsune
(scroll 8), who defeats them in two famous battles, the first at Ichi no Tani
(scroll 9), where he famously plunges down a cliff on horseback in “Rōba”
(The Old Horse), and again in the final battle at Dan no Ura (scroll 11), where
he annihilates the Heike forces, culminating in the death by drowning of the
child emperor Antoku along with other high-ranking Heike remnants, who
perish at sea with the sword of the three regalia. In most variants of the Heike,
the narrative ends with a series of executions of Heike heirs, including
Fukushō, Munemori, and Shigehira (scroll 11), culminating with the execu-
tion of the last surviving male Heike heir Rokudai in the last episode of scroll
12. In the Kakuichi-bon, however, the narrative concludes with a supplemen-
tary scroll called the Kanjō no maki (The Initiates Scroll), which recapitulates
the entire narrative from the viewpoint of Kenreimon’in (1155–1213), who at
one point envisions the experience of her family’s rise and fall as a passage
through the Rokudō, or the Six Levels of reincarnation. As the daughter of
Kiyomori and the principal surviving member of the Taira house,

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Kenreimon’in lived out her days as a Buddhist renunciant at Ōhara, praying

for the salvation of her son Emperor Antoku and the other Heike dead.
The “Kanjō no maki” highlights the role of the zatō (guild reciters),
familiarly known as biwa hōshi (biwa priest), as custodians and shapers of
one textual line of Heike narrative. Although parts of the “Kanjō no maki” are
found in the oldest variants of the Heike (arranged chronologically in scrolls 11
and 12 of the standard twelve-scroll versions), it was the reciters of the text
transmitted by the tōdō (guild), most likely the kengyō (master reciter)
Kakuichi himself, who are thought to have assembled and reshaped the
various parts into the “Kanjō no maki” that we have today. The scroll also
highlights the role of women in the Heike, including their likely contribution
to its creation. Although long acknowledged in modern scholarship on the
Heike (and in some premodern guild lore speculating about female author-
ship), the role of women in the Heike has been overshadowed by its classifica-
tion as a work belonging to the predominantly male-dominated genre of the
gunki (military chronicle). While battle narrative has a place in the Kakuichi-
bon, its role there is less significant than in several lesser known Heike variants,
whose titles actually draw attention to the military-chronicle-like aspect of
the work. The Genpei tōjōroku (The Record of the Genpei Battles, 1337), for
example, contains lengthy battle narratives that are highly sympathetic to
Genji warriors in the Eastern provinces, which are not included in the more
familiar Kakuichi-bon. The Genpei jōsuiki (The Record of the Rise and Fall of
the Genji and Heike) also contains much lengthier and more detailed
accounts of battle exploits, and in its overall form and structure emulates
the style of official historical chronicle, which is one reason it became the
basis for the official Tokugawa bakufu version of the Heike text.
For these and other reasons the Heike monogatari is not easily classified in
terms of genre. As already noted, it has been typically assigned to the gunki
genre, which is sometimes expanded to gunki monogatari (literally, military
chronicle tale), hinting at the hybridized nature of a form that combines
elements of the ikusagatari (battle tale), ki (chronicle), and monogatari (verna-
cular court tale). However, as this clumsy compound suggests, there are
problems with attempting to slot the Heike into one or another genre. For
example, if we compare the familiar Kakuichi-bon to earlier military chroni-
cles, such as Shōmonki (The Record of Masakado, 935–40) and Mutsuwaki (An
Account and Record of Mutsu, 1051–62), we note, on the one hand, little
attempt to capture the viewpoints or feelings of women in either of these
works, which differentiates them sharply from the Heike narratives. On the
other hand, a major element of military chronicles such as Shōmonki and

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Mutsuwaki is the gunchū-jō (report of a warrior’s battle exploits) to the

commander. Although hints of this are present in the Kakuichi-bon’s formulaic
battle narratives that typically include the dressing, naming (nanori), and,
occasionally, boasting of individual warriors, the raw battle report of exploits
is much more fully developed in several of the lesser-known Heike variants,
including the Engyō-bon Heike monogatari, the Genpei tōjōroku, and Genpei
jōsuiki. In several of the most famous battle narratives in the Kakuichi-bon,
the deaths of Tadanori and Atsumori in scroll 9, both Tadanori and Atsumori
refuse to even identify themselves. In the Engyō-bon, on the other hand,
Atsumori not only reveals his name, but the naming scene (nanori), as in
many equivalent scenes in the Engyō-bon, revolves explicitly around the issue
of warrior fame and rewards of property. To give one more example, in
“Kawara gassen” (The Battle at the Riverbed) also in scroll 9 of the Kakuichi-
bon, we are told that, “Following the defeat of Yoshinaka’s allies, Yoshitsune
had an account of the battle (kassen no shidai) recorded and sent by courier to
Yoritomo in Kamakura.” In the Engyō-bon version of this same battle at the
Uji Bridge, the narrator reports how Yoshitsune had a viewing platform
(takayagura) constructed close to the river’s edge, mounted it, and announced
his intention to record the name of the first to attack and report it to
Yoritomo in Kamakura. Battle narrative in the strict sense, with its focus on
rewards and victory, is more thoroughly subordinated in the Kakuichi-bon to
the theme of impermanence and the beautification of the defeated.
Another genre that is sometimes mentioned in connection to the Heike is
the rekishi monogatari (historical tale) for which the classical term was yotsugi
no monogatari (succession tale). In an often cited passage in Jien’s Gukanshō
(1221), a Buddhist historical work that includes a nearly contemporaneous
account of the Genpei War and its aftermath, Jien openly deplores the lack of
a succession tale to fill in the historical record. By succession tale, he meant
Heian period court narratives such as Eiga monogatari (Tales of Flowering
Fortunes, c. early twelfth century), Ōkagami (The Great Mirror, c. twelfth
century), and their successors. The Heike, which has been linked to Jien’s own
historical projects, may have been an attempt to fill in that gap. Episodes like
“Waga mi no eiga” (Kiyomori’s Flowering Fortunes), “Nidai no kisaki”
(Twice an Imperial Consort), and “Tōgūdachi” (The Naming of the Crown
Prince), all narrated in scroll 1, are very close to the world of refined courtly
sentiments and intrigue that characterize these Heian vernacular court tales.
But there are also striking departures from the yotsugi genre. In contrast to
the Heike, the classical Heian succession tale showed little if any interest in
battle narrative. And whereas the Heike narrative is built up of short

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setsuwa-like episodes or anecdotes, which have a clear beginning and end and
connect to a larger narrative arc, the Heian historical tales tended to meander
without focus, leaving chronology or mere dating to hold the narrative
together.
As a hybridizing text that includes vernacular court narrative in both its
historical and fictional modes, as well as battle narrative and a dating style
that emulates an official court chronicle, the Heike is rhetorically and stylis-
tically diverse, though it might also be seen as a narrative of competing
modes. At times, the chronological style can be extremely dense, as in
“Tōgudachi” in scroll 1; at other times, this concern with chronology fades
away entirely, yielding to long stretches of undated narrative in a fluid
vernacular style that approximates oral narration. An example of the latter
is the long sequence in scroll 7 that begins with “Shushō no miyako ochi”
(The Emperor’s Flight from the Capital) and continues through “Fukuhara
ochi” (The Flight from Fukuhara) at the end of the scroll. The content can
vary as well, from the comic in “Nekoma” and “Tsuzumi Hōgan” (The
Tsuzumi Police Lieutenant) in scroll 8 to the lyrical in such episodes as
“Tsukimi” (Moon-Viewing) and “Kogō” in scrolls 5 and 6. In addition to
the battle narrative already discussed, the Heike also includes a variety of
documents – ganmon (petitions), senji (edicts), chōjō (formal letters) – and uta
monogatari (poem-tales) and poetic forms such as waka, imayō (new-style
songs), and rōei (Chinese-style couplets for chanting).
Stylistically, the Kakuichi-bon is often said to exemplify the mixed Chinese
and vernacular style known as wakan konkō bun. It is best characterized,
however, as a work of competing styles. The use of antithesis (tsuiku), or
parallel phrases, gives weight and dignity to historical passages and can be
followed by a more vernacular style of narration in the melancholy tone of a
court romance. In passages of heightened emotional intensity, rhythmical
language in alternating phrases of seven and five syllables may be employed.
Examples are found in the preface, cited earlier, which begins with a hyōbyaku,
an introductory address commonly employed at the beginning of a Buddhist
mass (hōe), and in the michiyuki (travel scene) describing Shigehira’s journey to
Kamakura in “Kaidō kudari” (The Journey down the Eastern Sea Road) in
scroll 10. The style can thus range from the lofty register of Buddhist oratory
performed at a mass to the emotional plangency conveyed in stock vernacular
phrases like “koso aware nare” (how deeply moving) and colloquial onoma-
topoeia, as in “yoppite hyōdo hanatsu,” to convey the twang and thump of a
bow releasing an arrow. We may also surmise that the various musical
modes – hiroi, kudoki, shirakoe, and sanjū – which succeeded one another in

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accordance with fixed patterns of pacing and narrative content, also had an
influence in shaping the structure of the texts in the custody of the reciters,
although notations for these were not written down with any regularity until
the Edo period.
According to notations on a recopying of the original manuscript, Kakuichi
dictated his version on two separate occasions, one ending with scroll 12 and
dated to the twenty-ninth day of the eleventh month in Ōan 3, or 1370, and the
second completing the dictation of the “Kanjō no maki” in the following year,
1371, on the fifteenth day of the third month in Ōan 4. These dates represent a
terminus ad quem for a text whose origins are now thought to go back to the
first half of the thirteenth century, or about 150 years before Kakuichi had his
version recorded in writing. Based on an entry in Kujō Michie’s diary
Gyokuzui for the year 1220 (Jōkyū 2; 4; 29), which references a “Heike ki,”
scholars once conjectured a much earlier version of the Heike, with some
dating it back to as early as the last decade of the twelfth century, and others
to 1204 when the Buddhist priest Jien completed construction of a prayer hall
(dōjō) at Daisenpōin for the purpose of placating the “vengeful spirits” (ōnryō)
of the war dead going back to the Genpei battles and earlier. This pre-Jōkyū
origin of the Heike was until quite recently a widely held view, supported by
the authority of the founder of modern Heike textual studies, Yamada Yoshio
(1875–1958). Today, however, these “Heike ki,” or Heike records, are thought
to refer to private diaries kept by Heike nobles (kuge), which might have
supplied material for the Heike, but were not the ur-Heike (gen-Heike) that had
occupied scholars throughout much of the twentieth century.
The two decades that followed the Jōkyū rebellion, on the other hand,
extending from the 1220s through 1230s right up through the death of the
child Emperor Shijō in 1242, were a propitious period for the Heike to take
shape as a narrative. Enough time had elapsed for perspectives on the events
to form, and eye-witnesses, including women with ties to the Heike family,
were still alive and closely connected to the new court. This was also a period
of relative peace and cultural flowering, with something of a renewed Heike
presence at the court. The mother of the new Emperor GoHorikawa
(r. 1221–32), Kita-Shirakawa-in, was the grand-daughter of Taira Yorimori
(1132–86). Entries for this period in the Meigetsuki, the diary of the poet
Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241), even hint at something like a second flowering
of the Heike. Teika himself went out of his way to solicit poems from
Kenreimon’in’s former attendant, Ukyō no Daibu (1157–1232?), for inclusion
in the Shinchokusenshū (New Imperial Poetry Collection, 1235), which he was
editing for GoHorikawa. She had been the lover of Taira Sukemori, and her

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poetry collection, Kenreimon’in Ukyō no Daibu shū, was filled with reminis-
cences of such Taira notables as Shigehira, Koremori, Tsunemori, Kozaishō,
and others. Moreover, unlike his father Shunzei’s Senzaishū (Collection of a
Thousand Years, 1188), which famously listed several Heike poems as anon-
ymous, Teika’s collection names the Taira poets, signaling the new court’s
sympathy toward them. Traces of Ukyō no Daibu’s language are preserved
in Heike accounts of Koremori’s death by suicide in scroll 10 and in other
episodes as well.
If the Heike monogatari was beginning to coalesce as a narrative by the third
and fourth decades of the thirteenth century, it was a fluid and open “text,”
unstable, without fixed title, and of undetermined length and scope. Two
well-known documents allow us to gauge this formative period of Heike
growth and fluidity. The first is a notation on the reverse of Teika’s copy of
Hyōhanki (the mid twelfth-century diary of Taira Nobunori), a document
known as “Hyōhanki shihai monjo,” which refers to the copying of a six-
scroll Jishō monogatari (Tales of the Jishō Era) that was also known as Heike.
This is regarded as the earliest known mention of what later became Heike
monogatari. It was this document coupled with the 1220 Gyokuzui reference to
“Heike ki,” cited earlier, that led a previous generation of scholars to surmise
the existence of a now lost primitive form of the Heike monogatari. The
mention of a six-scroll Jishō monogatari that is also known as Heike now
tends to suggest parallels to such titles as Hōgen monogatari (Tales of
Hōgen), Heiji monogatari (Tales of Heiji), and Jōkyūki (Record of the Jōkyū
Era) – all of which emerged in these same post-Jōkyū decades – and thus a
period of narrower thematic focus, before the Heike narrative expanded its
scope. Almost forty years later, a second document dated 1259 not only
indicates an expansion of the text from six to eight scrolls or fascicles (jō),
but also provides the first confirmation of a text with the now familiar title
Heike monogatari. Discovered in 1974 by Yokoi Kiyoshi, the document known
as Jinken shojō (Jinken’s Letter) records the loan by Jinken, a priest of Daigoji
Temple, of an eight-scroll text that consists of six main scrolls and two
supplementary scrolls, these latter with writing “that is disconnected and
not in a condition for people to view.” We have here a glimpse at a text that is
expanding but still in a fluid state, which is being loaned out among temple
priests, further indicating that it has now passed beyond court circles, and
those likely to be sympathetic to the Heike, into religious spheres with quite
different aims and agendas. Moving forward to the early fourteenth century,
a pair of codicils on a manuscript that is now known as the Engyō-bon Heike
monogatari state that it was copied once over a two-year period in 1309–10 by a

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priest of Negoroji, a temple under the control of Mount Kōya, and a second
time at the same temple in 1419–20. By the latter period, Heike manuscripts
had been circulating for nearly two centuries, first among diarists close to the
court, and later, though perhaps contemporaneously in the earliest phase, at
a distance from the court among Buddhist priests, moving from Tendai
spheres at Enryakuji near the capital to Shingon spheres at Daigoji,
Negoroji, and the Mount Kōya temple complex, where the texts would
have gradually accreted the layers of Tendai, Shingon, and other Buddhist
doctrinal content that characterize the Engyō-bon. Between the two Engyō-bon
recopyings, separated by a century, there were no doubt numerous additions
and corrections to the text.
But while the Engyō-bon is generally considered to be the oldest extant
manuscript of the Heike, and in parts older in form than any other extant
variant, it is not the primitive version whose creation had been mythologized
in the famous anecdote – Section 226 – in the Tsurezuregusa (c. 1330), which
explains the origin of the Heike as a collaboration between a disgraced court
scholar, Yukinaga, learned in classical Chinese and court matters, and a
reciter of war tales from Tōgoku, named Shōbutsu, whose style of recitation,
according to the author Kenkō, was imitated by the biwa hōshi of the day. As
Sakurai Yōko has cautioned, even the Engyō-bon, when recopied again in
1419–20, incorporated revisions based on the Kakuichi dictated text.1 Thus,
despite the rawness and immediacy of many Engyō-bon stories, conveyed by
formulaic expressions about memory and transmission such as “mono kana
to zo oboeru” and “nochi ni hito ni katarikeru,” the Engyō-bon – and one must
infer the same for the formative phase of the Kakuichi dictated text of 1371 – is
a text that has been repeatedly worked upon, accreting layers of revision and
modifications in the process. The one definitive statement that we can make
about the formation of the numerous Heike variants is that they were the
product of a complex interaction between written and oral modes of trans-
mission. Their classification by most scholars into two broad lineages of
kataribon-kei (recited texts) and yomihon-kei (read texts) remains useful, but
only as long as we keep in mind that the distinction was not absolute, and that
texts of the recited lineage could also be read and vice-versa.
It is thus place and location rather than any one theory of specific author-
ship that are most likely to help us arrive at a fuller understanding of the
variant Heike texts. If the Kakuichi-bon conveys the viewpoint of a capital

1
Sakurai Yōko, “Engyōbon Heike monogatari Ōei shoshabon honbun saikō: ‘Kan’yōkyū’
byōsha kiji yori,” Kokubun 95 (2001): 47–57.

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audience and reader, with its nostalgic and idealized look back to an earlier
period of the court’s glory, the more forward looking Engyō-bon frequently
incorporates not only local battle narratives that have dropped out of the
Kakuichi-bon, the most famous being the long prophetic narrative of the
mustering of Yoritomo’s forces, Yoritomo no kyohei-tan (which gets only a
fleeting mention in scroll 5 of the Kakuichi-bon), but also doctrinal and ritual
concerns that are linked to the authority of specific sacred sites at Enryakuji,
Mount Kōya, and other temples in and outside the capital. In several variants
of the Heike, notably the Genpei tōjōroku, touched on earlier, and the Shibu
kassenjō-bon (The Four Part Battle Account), the local viewpoint of the text is
so pervasive as to constitute regional Heike variants, suggesting a trafficking
or exchange of manuscripts and cultural capital between the old centers of
power in the capital and the growing base of military power in Kamakura and
its satellite provinces.
As the Heike variants circulated throughout the fourteenth and into the
fifteenth centuries, copied and recopied by multiple hands, the story con-
tinued to propagate and gain ever larger audiences across all classes of
Japanese society, reaching a peak of popularity in the golden age of Heike
performance in the fifteenth century. Throughout this period, the Heike was
performed as entertainment, in ritual settings, and could straddle both ritual
and secular spheres. Performances of Heike took place at banquet settings,
prayer halls (where it may have served a placatory function), in the kitchen
area (daidokoro), before Buddhist altars (butsuzen) and shrines (shatō), outside
the gates of houses (monzen) and in the streets, and even on boats and in the
reception halls (kyakuden) of the nobility.
The earliest reference to a biwa hōshi performing the Heike is in the Futsū
shōdō shū (Collection of Ordinary Preaching, 1297), which singles out the biwa
hōshi’s fluent recitation from memory. The earliest mention of an actual
performance of the Heike is by a blind (mōmoku) reciter named Daishinbō,
who began a complete performance of the entire Heike (ichibu-Heike) at
Kōfukuji in 1309, on the sixth day of the first month in the second year of
Enkyō. This same Daishinbō, who may have belonged to a guild of blind
reciters under the control of Kōfukuji, also appears as the partner of the
master reciter Kakuichi in a duet performance (tsure-Heike) of a lost Heike
piece “Ayame” that is recorded in an episode in scroll 21 of Taiheiki (Chronicle
of Great Peace). By the year 1326, Kamakura documents were taking note of
the existence of guild (za) reciters, and by at least 1340 aristocratic diaries such
as Naka-no-in ipponki were distinguishing between reciters inside and outside
the guild (zachū and zagai). The number of reciters increased dramatically

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over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the early
fifteenth century, the diarist of Noritoki gyoki is recording large gatherings
of eighty-one reciters that included kengyō and lower level zatō to conduct
the guild ritual suzumi on the twenty-ninth day in the sixth month of Ōei
12 (1405). By the middle of the fifteenth century, in 1462, the Hekizan nichiroku
(Blue Mountain Record), a diary kept by the Zen priest Unzen Taikyoku, lists
five to six hundred Heike reciters active in the capital alone. Performed to the
accompaniment of the biwa in both public and private spaces, read in manu-
script form, and recreated at Enryakuji as Heike picture scrolls (Heike ekotoba),
the Heike by this time had been adapted to all the available media of the day.
Over the course of the fourteenth century, it had also acquired authority as a
written text, cited and referenced by a variety of works. These included Shōkū
shōnin denki izoku shū (The Collected Biographical Remains of Saint Shōkū,
1300), which cited a ganmon (signed petition) of Kiyomori from the Heike, and
the historical narrative Masukagami (The Clear Mirror, c. 1333–76), together
indicating Heike’s authority in both sacred and secular spheres. We also catch
glimpses of the Heike as a text for reading. In entries from Sanjōnishi
Sanetaka’s journal Sanetaka kōki for the years spanning the 1470s up through
1509, Sanetaka on three separate occasions records reading one to two scrolls
of the Heike, viewing Heike picture scrolls, and looking at partition screens
(byōbu) decorated with scenes from the Heike. By the sixteenth century, there
are even requests to correct copied texts of the Heike, further evidence of its
authoritative aura.
As understanding of the variant Heike texts has increased and combined
with a new interpretive openness that looks beyond the constraining cate-
gory of warrior literature – largely a modern construct – a much different
understanding of Heike narrative has come into view. The quest for a unifying
theory of Heike formation and the dream of an ur-Heike that dominated
twentieth-century discussions has receded. Like all quests, it had its heroic
side, running the gamut from conjectures about individual authors to press-
ing the Heike into an epic mold that might better serve the need for nation
building. But with the emphasis now on place and audience rather than
nation to explain the numerous variants, the Heike’s genre-defying form
begins to look like its peculiar strength. The state of the field can now be
said to approximate medieval European literature studies, where the shift
from an older practice of philology that focused on the construction of textual
stemma and the pursuit of the best text has yielded to a synchronic view of
the open and variable text. More than ever, it is a propitious time to rethink
the Heike’s place in the growing field of world literature studies. If scholars of

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the Meiji period (1868–1912) were bold enough to bring the Heike into
comparison with Dante’s Commedia, the Homeric epics, the Finnish
Kalevala, the Indian Ramayana and other narrative traditions, it is time for
students of the Heike to follow their lead and join again in discussions about
the definitions and meanings of the epic, the novelistic, and other questions
of form and reception that are relocating debates about national traditions in
the broader landscape of world literature and translation studies. The Heike
has a lot to offer in these debates.

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 31
The late medieval warrior tales: from
Soga monogatari to Taiheiki
elizabeth oyler

In the late medieval period, or the Muromachi period, a body of works

developed that focused, not only on war and battles, but instead on the
lives of specific warriors associated with the Genpei period (the Minamoto
versus Taira wars in the late twelfth century). The two most representative
are Soga monogatari (Tale of the Revenge of the Soga Brothers) and Gikeiki
(Chronicle of Yoshitsune), two long war tales about events related to
Minamoto Yoritomo’s establishment of the Kamakura shogunate. The
Muromachi period would also give birth to the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great
Peace, c. 1370), a war chronicle (about the Northern and Southern Courts
period) whose impact on Japanese culture was to be as great as that of the
Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike).

Soga monogatari
Soga monogatari recounts a personal vendetta enacted in 1192, during the
peace immediately following the war. The variants of Soga monogatari’s four
main textual lineages consist of eight to twelve chapters and appear to have
been compiled between the late Kamakura and the Muromachi periods. The
oldest extant texts are from the mid sixteenth century. What is thought to be
the oldest variant line, the Mana-bon, consists of ten chapters and is written in
hentai kanbun (a writing style reliant primarily on Chinese characters and
syntax); other variants are in kana. Episodes within chapters are titled, as in
Hōgen, Heiji, and Heike. Scholars think the Mana-bon was edited and circulated
by preachers of the Agui sect with ties to Hakone Shrine (near Kamakura, in
the east). It has also been suggested that this version was derived from shōdō
preaching and originally propagated by itinerant female narrator/minstrels
known as goze, also associated with Hakone Shrine.

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Soga monogatari is episodic and demonstrates a clearly Buddhist editorial

hand. It focuses on the private vengeance taken by the Soga brothers, Jūrō
and Gorō, who spend their childhood years planning the murder of the
kinsman who killed their father in an ambush when the boys were small.
The kinsman from whom the brothers exacted personal justice is Suketsune,
and the feud that they inherited was internecine: two generations back, their
grandfather, Sukechika, and his putative cousin, Suketsugu, had been
embroiled in a dispute about inheritance rights. Suketsune was Suketsugu’s
son. The situation is further complicated by long-standing hostility between
Minamoto Yoritomo and Sukechika. As a young man still in exile, Yoritomo
had initiated a liaison with Sukechika’s daughter, from which a son had been
born. Fearing the wrath of Kiyomori, Sukechika ordered the infant to be
killed; Yoritomo bore him enmity from that point forward. After much
preparation and several failed attempts to kill Suketsune, the brothers finally
enact their vendetta during a hunt hosted by Yoritomo, which necessitates
their deaths – by violating the shogun’s encampment, they have embraced a
destiny with only one possible outcome.
Although the story it tells is on a much reduced scale than Heike’s, in form
Soga monogatari resembles the longer work: it is part of a narrative perfor-
mance tradition, exists also in variants intended to be read, focuses on
doomed heroes, and concludes with a chapter about women left behind
who pray for the souls of the brothers. However, in its biographical focus and
celebration of what amounts to private (rather than larger communal or clan)
concerns, it moves one strand of historical narrative more definitively in a
direction only suggested in the Heike: the romanticization of individual
heroes and the de-emphasis, or perhaps masking, of what remained impor-
tant political dimensions of the stories being told. Along with Minamoto
Yoshitsune, discussed below, the Soga brothers are among the most impor-
tant cultural icons and beloved heroes of this era, and they become the
subjects of performance genres including kōwakamai (ballad-drama) and
kabuki in the medieval and early modern periods.

Gikeiki
Gikeiki, the dating of which is uncertain, takes historical storytelling yet
another step further in this direction. A fanciful biography of Minamoto
Yoshitsune, the youngest of Yoritomo’s brothers, Gikeiki is a compilation of
shorter narratives about the life of the Genpei War’s most beloved
Minamoto hero. As with the other tales of warriors, it exists in several

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variants and is the product of narrative aggregation in the hands of multiple

compilers, though their ideological concerns are not consistently evident as
they are in other works. Gikeiki reached its final form by approximately the
fifteenth century. Most variants consist of eight chapters divided further
into named episodes that are, in the main, longer than those found in the
Heike. Gikeiki episodes may have been part of the repertoire of the biwa
hōshi.
What renders Yoshitsune memorable in Gikeiki is not his battlefield
heroics, however – these are described in one brief paragraph in the text.
Rather, it is his tragic end that captures the imagination: following the war, he
incurs the suspicion of Yoritomo, who eventually orders Yoshitsune’s death.
After four years as a fugitive, Yoshitsune is betrayed by the heirs of a long-
standing supporter and forced to commit suicide. Gikeiki chronicles his youth
at Kurama Temple (north of the capital), where he has been sent after
Yoshitomo’s defeat in the Heiji uprising, and his flight and death. The one
episode dedicated to the Genpei War represents an important division in the
narrative: as a youth, Yoshitsune is preternaturally talented, bold, and eager
to avenge his father’s death; during his flight, he is weak, refined, and almost
entirely reliant on loyal retainers to coordinate his escape. The tendency
toward favoring tragic heroes can be seen in all of the works discussed here,
but the modern term for sympathy for the underdog, hōgan biiki, or “sym-
pathy for the Lieutenant,” refers specifically to the character of Yoshitsune,
whose title was Lieutenant.
Gikeiki is but one salient example of an important trend both in historical
narrative and in narrative arts broadly speaking during the fifteenth century.
As the Heike circulated in multiple forms and reached a variety of audiences,
the magnetism of its individual characters and episodes inspired retellings,
amplifications, recastings, and sequels in evolving storytelling traditions as
well as newly emergent arts like kōwakamai, kojōruri, and noh. This context
for tales of the Genpei period is vital to understanding the cultural meaning of
the historical narratives it engenders. For as much as audiences listened to the
Heike, they also read, saw, or heard other versions of similar or related stories
in other contexts. The effect of such a milieu was to create an underlying
body of depictions of the Genpei period that exhibited many of the same
productive tensions found in the various narratives considered above: multi-
ple renditions of any given episode in textual or orally or dramatically
performed versions all contributed to the creation of a multifaceted “text”
immanent in any individual work or performance: Yoshitsune was and is
always at once the fierce field commander and the reticent fugitive; many

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Heike heroes are simultaneously men who die on the battlefield in the Heike
and the ghosts of those men in the noh.

Taiheiki
The final major medieval war tale – arguably as important for medieval and
early modern readers and audiences as Heike – is Taiheiki, which narrates the
tumultuous events and aftermath of the Kenmu Restoration of 1333–6.
Written in wakan-konkōbun (mixed Chinese–Japanese style), the forty
chapters of Taiheiki trace events from 1318 to 1367, a period that witnessed
the division of the royal line and simultaneous existence of Northern and
Southern imperial courts, as well as the overthrow of the Kamakura shogu-
nate, an event closely tied to the royal schism. The central figure, Emperor
GoDaigo (1288–1339), started the Kenmu (imperial) restoration and then later
established the Southern Court when his restoration failed.
As with the Soga monogatari and the Gikeiki, the authorship and date of
composition for Taiheiki are unknown, and it is likely that numerous people
had a hand in its composition. It exists in multiple textual lineages. The tale in
forty chapters we have today is thought to have been circulating by the 1370s.
An early reference is found in a 1374 entry in the diary of the courtier Tōin
Kinsada, who credits its compilation to the Priest Kojima, an obscure figure.
Imagawa Ryōshun recounts that corrections to a version presented to
Ashikaga Tadayoshi by the Tendai Priest Enchin were ordered by
Tadayoshi and undertaken by the Priest Gen’e. As Gen’e’s death is recorded
midway through the text, this probably was an early version. Taiheiki was,
from early on, the subject of commentary: Ryōshun’s Nan Taiheiki of 1402
was one early critique, written by a descendant of an Ashikaga partisan.
Taiheiki is generally considered to be divisible into three segments pre-
ceded by a prologue. The first spans chapters 1–11 (GoDaigo’s ascension
through the fall of the Kamakura bakufu), the second, chapters 12–21 (begin-
ning of the Kenmu Restoration through GoDaigo’s death), and the third,
23–40 (through the appearance of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1367). The twenty-
second chapter is missing from all early texts. The Heike monogatari is an
obvious antecedent, and parts of the Taiheiki seem strongly modeled on it,
although a Neo-Confucian worldview overlays the Heike’s Buddhist one, and
it glorifies warfare less than many of its predecessors. Records from the
Muromachi period indicate that Taiheiki was part of a performance tradition,
and markings for kyokusetsu (melodic patterns) reminiscent of those used in
Heike recitation are extant from the fifteenth century. Unlike the musically

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based heikyoku tradition of the Tales of the Heike, however, the Taiheiki
became, in the Edo period, part of a larger story-telling, recitational genre
in which parts of the text were read aloud and then expounded on.
In the shadow of the works chronicling the rise of the Minamoto in the
Genpei War, Taiheiki shows a strong sense of the alternation of power
between the Taira and the Minamoto and of the importance of placing the
actions described in the work in the context of that larger history. Taiheiki
devotes special attention to heroic defenders of the losing side (such as Nitta
Sanesada and Kusunoki Masashige) and condemns their tormentors, in
particular Kō Moronao. Like the heroes and villains of Heike, these men
would become a vital part of Japan’s cultural memory, appearing in later
genres and commemorated at locations associated with their lives. Even
more than Heike, the heroes of Taiheiki (for example the father–son pairing
of Masashige and his son, Masayuki) would become paragons of filial virtue
in later Neo-Confucian contexts.
As a group, the war tales represent important cultural trends that would
shape the medieval and early modern worlds. Focused on the activities of the
warriors, and often set in the provinces, they redefined the scope of historical
action both socially and geographically. By incorporating a variety of voices,
styles, linguistic registers, and forms, they represented the complexity of a
society working to construct a coherent history out of moments of war and
fragmentation. The liveliness of the narratives that emerged in this context,
the retellings they inspired, and their power to function as cultural metaphors
for centuries after their creation attest to the vitality and the weight of the
stories the war tales told.

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Literature of medieval Zen temples:
Gozan (Five Mountains) and Ikkyū Sōjun
sonja arntzen

Gozan Bungaku (Literature of the Five Mountains) encompasses a vast corpus of

texts in literary Chinese produced by Zen monks during the Kamakura and
Muromachi periods. Gozan (“Five Mountains”) designates the top five ranks of
the Rinzai Zen monastic system and also stands for the system as a whole, which
at its height included hundreds of temples and sub-temples throughout Japan.
The monk Myōan Eisai (1141–1215) is credited with introducing Rinzai Zen
to Japan from Song China. In his footsteps over the next century followed
many other monks who were disillusioned with the older esoteric schools of
Buddhism and went to China seeking inspiration. They found Zen (Ch. Chan)
in ascendance at the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou. In Japan, the
returning missionaries were fortunate to receive patronage from three gen-
erations of Hōjō regents. Thus, Zen monasteries proliferated first in
Kamakura, where the Hōjō were based. For the Hōjō regents, Zen repre-
sented the newest manifestation of Chinese elite culture and provided an
opportunity for the creation of a more tractable Buddhist institution to
counterbalance the entrenched and militarized great monasteries of the
capital (Kyoto). Moreover, at the time of the Mongol take-over of China, a
significant number of talented and erudite Chinese Zen monks sought refuge
in Japan. As cultural leaders, they attracted many converts. Interestingly, the
attempted Mongol invasions of Japan stopped the flow of monks back and
forth between the two countries only briefly. One of the Chinese masters
who played a large role in Japanese Zen, Yishan Yining (1247–1317) actually
came first to Japan as a Mongol emissary in 1299. He was put under house
arrest as a possible spy but was later invited to become abbot of Kenchōji
Temple in Kamakura. He taught many Japanese monks, including Musō
Soseki (1275–1351). In the long history of cultural exchange between China and
Japan, up until the modern period, there was never so much person-to-person
contact between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals as during this period.

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The Ashikaga bakufu leaders also generously patronized Rinzai Zen. The
Gozan system expanded rapidly in the Muromachi period and its major
temples became closely connected with the Ashikaga administration.
Gozan monks managed the Ashikaga bakufu’s diplomatic relations with
China, which came to be centered on the lucrative trade with Ming China
in books and luxury goods. The reputation for good financial management in
Gozan temples led to their prelates becoming financial advisors to the
bakufu. Meanwhile, Gozan monasteries invested the profits they earned
from the China trade into ventures one might not normally associate with
temples, such as money-lending and sake-brewing.
Culturally, the Gozan centers enjoyed prestige from their monopoly on
knowledge of the most recent intellectual developments in China. The
monasteries functioned as universities where study included not only Zen
Buddhism but Chinese letters in a broad sense including poetry, history, and
secular philosophy such as Neo-Confucianism. It was not only higher learn-
ing that was handled at Gozan monasteries. Most of the biographies of Gozan
monks show them enrolled in monasteries at the age of six or seven. One
must imagine the monasteries full of young boys and adolescents. All learn-
ing within the monastery system was conducted on the basis of Chinese
literary texts. From their childhood, Japanese Zen monks lived in a China of
the mind.
Japanese scholars have divided the development of Gozan literature into
four stages. Kageki Hideo’s schema may be taken as representative. He sees a
first period of “Growth” from 1279 to 1330, a second period of “Peak” from
1330 to 1386, a third period of “ Full Maturity” from 1386 to 1467, and a fourth
period of “Decline” from 1467 to 1615.1 Kageki’s periodization is based on the
genre of poetry. Although Gozan literature includes a large number of
genres – essays, sermons, commentary on classical Chinese texts, inscriptions
on paintings, and so on – the poetry produced by Gozan monks is usually
considered to have the greatest literary interest. For this reason, this essay too
will focus on poetry.
Sesson Yūbai (1290–1346) may be taken as representative of the early period
of Gozan poetry. Sesson started his Zen training in Japan under the Chinese
master Yishan Yining and, at the young age of sixteen, pursued further studies
in China. He lived in China for twenty-one years, which included a short
period of imprisonment and thirteen years of exile, due to one Mongol
emperor’s desire to punish the Japanese. The following Mongol emperor,

1
Kageki Hideo, Gozan shishi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1977), 10–11.

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however, honored Sesson in 1328 with the abbacy of a temple in Chang’an.

Nonetheless, he returned to Japan the following year and later served as head
of several Gozan temples. His poetry is plain-spoken and in the “Ancient”
style,” an older and freer form that did not require the rigorous tonal
harmony of “Regulated Verse.”
I take no joy in other people’s praise,
Other people’s slander doesn’t scare me,
Just because my ties with the world are sparse
The heart in my bosom is unconstrained as water.
Bound in prison fetters, I survived,
And stayed on in Ch’ang-an three years –
When sometimes it suits my mood to sing
I speak out straight: why bother with fancy words? (Ury, 36)

The peak of Gozan poetry is represented by Gidō Shūshin (1325–88) and

Zekkai Chūshin (1336–1405). Both wrote in regulated verse forms and had
their poetry praised by Chinese readers. Both were disciples of Musō Soseki.
Of the two, Gidō was more the scholar and lectured often on literature. His
most distinguished student was the young Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimitsu
(1358–1408). Gidō was unusual in his generation for not going to China; ill
health in his youth thwarted his ambition to do so. Gidō wrote prolifically on
both religious and secular topics, always with a rather light touch. Many of
his poems were composed as inscriptions for paintings. Here is one com-
posed for a painting on a fan:
Dim fringe of cloud and lustrous moon-disc:
The little boats have left for harbor; now is dusk.
Surely the fishers need not fear that their homes may be hard to find:
Village under plum blossoms radiant at river’s edge. (Ury, 95)

Zekkai went to China in 1368, the year of the founding of the Ming dynasty,
and stayed until 1376. Zekkai’s poetry is considered weightier and more
accomplished than Gidō’s. Nonetheless, most of his poems are on secular
topics. The following poem is on a visit to a ruined temple in China but the
tone is more that of an antiquarian tourist than a monk.
Which way, deep in wisteria and ivy all around,
Does this ancient temple gate face?
Eaves have fallen like blossoms in the passing rains,
Wild birds caw right in one’s face;
The image of the seated Buddha has sunk into the weeds,
The gold leaf of some wealthy donor peeled from its base:

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No date remains on the fragment of stone inscription

To tell whether the temple dates from T’ang or Sung. (Pollack, 104)

Kageki’s third stage of Gozan literature coincides with the greatest

extension of the Gozan monastic system, but it was also a time when
many Gozan monks were more active as clerks, commercial agents, and
fine arts consultants for the Ashikaga bakufu than they were as committed
monks. Large quantities of poetry were produced out of the busy social
life at Gozan temples that revolved around the importation and connois-
seurship of Chinese painting, ceramics, and tea. Accordingly, the tendency
toward secular topics increased. Kōzei Ryūha (1375–1446) is a representa-
tive poet of this era. Kōzei developed a more mannered style of poetry
based on Late Tang poetry and the work of the Song poet Huang
Tingjian.
Kageki’s date for the decline of Gozan literature coincides with the begin-
ning of the Ōnin War (1467–77). That war dealt a crippling blow to the
Gozan’s primary patron, the Ashikaga bakufu, and razed all the great temples
in Kyoto to the ground. Gozan monks scattered through the country like
dandelion seeds, and although this loss of a home base was not propitious for
new literary developments, it helped to spread Gozan taste in poetry, paint-
ing, and garden design throughout the provinces.

Ikkyū Sōjun
Ironically, arguably the most famous Zen monk of the medieval era, Ikkyū
Sōjun (1394–1481) was not a Gozan monk. As an adolescent, he chose study
with monks of the Daitoku-ji lineage. Daitoku-ji Temple had been demoted
from Gozan status by the Ashikaga bakufu for political reasons and even-
tually it opted out of the system. Ikkyū’s fame is due to several factors. His
strong and eccentric personality not only attracted notoriety in his own
lifetime but also launched a legend that was elaborated in Edo period popular
tales. The part of that legend that imagined Ikkyū’s life as a clever child monk
still lives in modern Japanese pop culture. Ikkyū’s role as Zen teacher to
major figures in renga, noh drama, and the tea ceremony secured him a place
in history as a leader in the artistic movement that fused Zen philosophy with
a distinctively medieval aesthetic style. Ikkyū’s fame outside of Japan has
been aided by the publication of three full-length studies in English on the
man and his poetry, something linked in turn to a small “boom” in Ikkyū
studies in Japan during the 1970s and 80s.

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Ikkyū is an exception in more ways than one. His life and his poetry
collected in the Kyōunshū are marked by an iconoclastic stance. In one sense,
his work as a poet can be seen as reclaiming the earlier, more vigorous style of
Zen poetry. He wrote in the freer “Ancient” style rather than regulated verse
and most of his poems are on religious topics and engage in Zen debate. In
another sense, Ikkyū’s poetry may be regarded as the leading edge of decline.
Certainly his mastery of Chinese prosody was nowhere near that of poets such
as Gidō and Zekkai. He never wrote to their “professional” standards. Chinese
verse was his vehicle for self-expression; sometimes he bent and even broke the
language to give vent to his passionate feelings. The following poem was
addressed to Yōsō (1376–1458), the senior disciple in Ikkyū’s lineage, upon
Ikkyū’s withdrawal from Daitoku-ji as a protest against Yōsō’s efforts to
court donations from Sakai merchants.

Ten days as an abbot and my mind is churning.

Under my feet, the red thread of passion is long.
If you come another day and ask for me,
Try a fish shop, tavern, or else a brothel. (Arntzen, 1986, 25)

Breaking the precepts of vegetarianism, sobriety, and celibacy is thought to

have been very widespread in Muromachi Zen temples, but no other monk
poets wrote as openly about their own lapses as Ikkyū. Such assertions on
Ikkyū’s part challenged the façade of the entire system. In fact, Ikkyū is the
only Zen monk to have made sex a topic for poetry. What is more, in his
seventies, he wrote some of the happiest love poems in Japanese literature, a
tradition in which melancholy and despair have been the more constant
muses. Ikkyū’s poems are dedicated to the blind singer Mori, with whom he
had a relationship for a decade or so.

Blind Mori every night accompanies my singing;

Under the covers, mandarin ducks, intimate talk always new;
Promise anew to meet in the dawn of Maitreya.
Here at the home of the old Buddha, all things are in spring.
(Arntzen, 1986, 158)

Yet, in other poems, self-doubt is his theme, as in this one, “Written

When Ill.”

A monk who has broken the precepts for eighty years,

Repenting a Zen that has ignored cause and effect.
When ill, one suffers the effect of past deeds:
Now how to atone for eons of bad karma? (Arntzen, 1986, 34)

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These contradictions in Ikkyū’s life and poetry have made him somehow
more approachable than the other Zen monks of the period. Ikkyū’s poems
on Zen do not lend themselves to easy citation because they are dense with
allusion and require extensive commentary for proper appreciation, but they
do repay that effort.

Topics in Gozan literature

The tendency in modern Japanese literary scholarship to exclude works in
Chinese by Japanese authors from consideration as “Japanese” literature has
resulted in a neglect of Gozan literature within Japan and consequently in
Western language studies of Japanese literature as well. Nonetheless, it
presents many topics worthy of exploration. In the history of Sino-Japanese
cultural exchange, the scale of personal relationships between Gozan monks
and their Chinese counterparts stands out as remarkable. The Gozan poets’
particular understanding of Chinese poetry also deserves attention. We
know, for example, that Gidō gave lectures on the Santi shi (J. Santaishi).
This Song Dynasty anthology of Tang poetry “in three forms,” as the title
indicates, experienced only a brief period of popularity in Song China as a
manual for a general audience of would-be poets, yet it became the “bible” of
Chinese poetry for kanshi poets within Japan throughout the medieval period
and well into the Tokugawa period. The anthology’s predilection for Late
Tang style and the dazzling couplet had enormous influence on Gozan
poetry. Was it just the chance circumstances of the book trade or was there
a specific resonance with Japanese native taste that determined the selection
of the Santi shi? The Zen monks’ appreciation of Chinese poetry and art in
turn shaped the medieval aesthetic in Japan which gave rise to new devel-
opments in garden design, sumi-e painting, drama, poetry, and the tea
ceremony, developments which have been revered ever since as representing
quintessential Japanese taste even though their inspiration welled from
Chinese sources. Finally, there is an intriguing connection between Gozan
poetry and modern Japanese literature. One of the founding fathers of the
modern Japanese novel, Natsume Sōseki, had as firm a foundation in classical
Chinese literature as he had in English literature. He himself wrote Chinese
poetry his whole life, but with particular intensity during the last hundred
days of his life. Sōseki took his major inspiration as a kanshi poet from the
Gozan poets. What might that mean? Sōseki also had something in common
with Ikkyū in that he fearlessly explored new topics in kanshi poetry, includ-
ing his confrontations with his own body.

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 33
Renga (linked verse)
steven d. carter

Renga (“linked verse”) refers to a communal form of poetry already current in

the era of the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times,
c. 1205–21) that would only gain in popularity and status over the next four
centuries. Typically, renga was the creation not of one poet but of two or
more people taking turns in the composition of stanzas of seventeen or
fourteen syllables, any two of which would constitute a complete waka.
While some renga sequences comprised only a few stanzas (kusari renga), in
time the standard form became the hyakuin, or one-hundred-verse sequence,
mimicking in some ways another sub-genre of waka, the one-hundred-verse
anthology (hyakushu-waka).
In the Heian era renga was essentially a verse-capping game in which prizes
were awarded to composers of winning links – the latter being a tradition that
would persist for centuries. By the mid 1200s, however, renga was developing a
strong affiliation with courtly aesthetics that – especially in elite circles – would
become stronger with time. Documentary records of that era reveal that renga
were often composed after more serious waka gatherings, according to sets of
rules for composition that were developed by prominent court poets.
The increasing importance of renga in the 1300s is apparent from the fact that
one of the personal waka anthologies of the commoner priest-poet Tonna (also
Ton’a; 1289–1372) contains one hundred tsukeku (two-verse links). Other sources
corroborate the emergence of linked verse as a fixture even at the highest social
levels. Earlier on, renga had been an amusement, pure and simple; and we
know that it had been appropriated by jige (commoner) renga masters who
held boisterous linking parties “under the blossoms” at temples like Hōsshōji,
Bishamondō, and Shōhōji. But one sure sign that the genre was finding a more
significant place in elite culture was its increasing connection to ritual life, as in
the case of a hōraku senku, a “dedicatory” sequence of one thousand verses
sponsored by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiakira (1330–67) at Kitano Shrine in the
mid 1350s, again following common practice in waka circles.

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Nijō Yoshimoto and the rise of courtly renga

The one figure most centrally involved in championing renga as a courtly
genre was Tonna’s student and patron – a not uncommon combination in the
medieval period – Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–88). As the heir of the Nijō house (a
regental lineage distinct from the Nijō poetic house), Yoshimoto was a man
at the top of the social order who served as regent four times, experiencing at
first hand the rebellion of Emperor GoDaigo (1288–1339), the collapse of the
Kamakura shogunate, the split that created the Northern and Southern
Courts, and all the political infighting and disruption that attended these
seminal events.
Throughout his life, Yoshimoto was dedicated to reviving traditions of
court ceremony that had been discontinued during the years of turmoil in the
capital, and his commitment to poetry was of the same order. Like many
other courtier poets, he saw renga – and waka – as central not only to court
culture but to the practical maintenance of peace and propriety, as is evident
in this statement from his Tsukuba mondō (Tsukuba Dialogues, 1372).

If the content of a verse is upright and its words subdued, then it will blend
with the voices of an orderly world. This is what is meant by renga of courtly
elegance.

The phrase “voices of an orderly world” alludes to the Great Preface to the
Chinese Shijing (Book of Songs, 600 BCE), one of the most authoritative of all
classical statements on poetry and the foundation for didactic claims about
literary expression in much Japanese poetic discourse. To allude to such a text
in support of what was a relatively new genre amounted in itself to a
promotion in status.
Yoshimoto was a figure of importance in the waka world who even penned
the preface to the twentieth imperial anthology of waka, Shingoshūishū (New
Later Collection of Gleanings, 1383). Yet historically his most important con-
tribution was to the development of renga as an art. His father had evidently
been a participant in the linked verse parties held beneath the cherry blossoms
alluded to above, which were popular among all classes, and Yoshimoto was
thus to an extent following his father’s lead. Interestingly, however, Yoshimoto
turned for help to a commoner poet, a man named Gusai (also read Kyūsei; d.
1378) whose work he regarded as well above the standard of most hana no moto
(under the blossoms) masters. Having studied waka under a member of the
noble Reizei house, Gusai evidently had high ambitions himself and was a
willing participant in Yoshimoto’s project.

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From 1345 to 1372 Yoshimoto produced four major treatises aimed at draw-
ing attention to renga as a literary art, providing it with a historical narrative
that connected it to the earliest times, and analyzing it in aesthetic terms taken
directly from similar works in the waka tradition. At the same time, however,
he extolled the genre’s own particular qualities by focusing much of his
attention on the art of linking and on the standard hyakuin as an aesthetic
whole. Here again, the values he promulgated – subtlety, deep feeling (ushin),
mystery and depth (yūgen), flowing syntax, and elegant diction – were those of
the waka tradition; but they went beyond that tradition to form the foundation
for a distinct but complementary form of verbal art that had at its core the
communal experience of creating poetry spontaneously at a highly ritualized
social gathering.
The specific principles of the genre that Yoshimoto and Gusai envisioned
are readily apparent in a rulebook for the genre they produced in the late
1370s, incorporating material from a number of earlier such works. The first
of their principles is that each verse in a hundred-verse sequence must do
double duty, standing on its own as an independent statement but also
linking with the verses that precede or follow it to constitute a complete
link (tsukeku). Above and beyond this, the rules are designed with one
primary idea in mind – constant change. Thus repetition of central thematic
or topical categories (namely those of the waka tradition – the seasons, love,
travel, etc.) is restricted, as are seriation and recurrence of those same and
other lexical categories. Every sequence in this way would present the
dominant imagery of the courtly poetic tradition, but always in a kind of
random sequencing, making for a whole that in its parts represents endless
variety while in its whole expressing the Buddhist idea of unity within
change.
Yoshimoto and Gusai were of course less the originators of these ideas
than their most ardent and successful articulators. Earlier poets from both
courtly and commoner traditions had laid the foundation for their work. But
in 1356–7 when Yoshimoto and Gusai put together an anthology of linked
verse organized in every way like an imperial anthology of waka, entitled
Tsukubashū (Tsukuba Collection), they were clearly elevating the art to a new
level of social prestige. The anthology collected links and first verses (hokku)
by courtiers from Shinkokinshū times and also by Nijō Tameuji (1222–86) and
Reizei Tamesuke (1263–1328), as well as hana no moto masters, but pride of
place was given to more recent poets who approached their art with high
seriousness. Most conspicuous among them was Gusai himself, among
whose links was this one (no. 631).

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Buddhism. From a thousand-verse sequence

composed at the house of the Regent
Tsuki samushi Ah, such a cold moon!
toburaikimasu It makes me wish for a friend
tomo mogana to come and visit.
Nodera no kane no From a temple on the plain,
tōki aki no yo a far bell in the autumn night.
Elegant in diction and imagery, and serious in theme, such poems conformed
readily to the aesthetic of “deep feeling” (ushin) articulated by Fujiwara no
Teika (1162–1241), as well as being fine examples of linking that relied less on
word-play than on suggestion and reasoning.
Yoshimoto’s labors were so successful that the Tsukubashū was granted
status as a junior-imperial anthology at the request of the shogun. Headnotes
in the anthology and elsewhere show that renga was being composed all over
the Home Provinces, in temples and shrines, at homes of the nobility and the
military aristocracy. While eschewing the notion of a renga meeting as a
drinking party, he still saw renga as a social art, albeit an elegant one
dominated by aesthetic concerns – a proposition expressed clearly in his
Renri hishō (Treasured Notes on the Principles of Linking, 1349):

If one chooses carefully the right time, gathers together only true connois-
seurs of the Way, clears one’s mind of distractions, makes the site peaceful,
and proceeds quietly – that is when people will compose superb verses.

Implicit in this statement is recognition of the social nature of renga as a

genre, a trait that it shared with waka but to an even greater degree.
Perhaps for this reason, even in Yoshimoto’s time most sequences were
still not recorded, since renga sequences were considered fleeting
moments of aesthetic and social experience: “events” that did not always
attain to the status of “texts”. In general, though, members of the cultural
elite were more likely than their counterparts among the hana no moto
masters to record their creations, leading to a general increase in the
number of preserved texts beginning in the late 1300s.
After Yoshimoto renga would remain a courtly form practiced even in the
houses of the nobility, where records show us that nearly as many poets were
meeting together for monthly renga meetings (tsukinami-kai) as for waka
gatherings. Among the military elite, in fact, linked verse was if anything
beginning to surpass the waka in popularity. Banquets and group activities
that helped bond vassals together socially were staples in warrior society, and

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on such occasions rounds of linking – many undertaken in a spirit not entirely

in keeping with Yoshimoto’s aesthetic preoccupations – fit in perfectly. This
tension between elite aesthetic ideals and the spontaneity of the social
moment would inform the history of linked verse forever after.

Reunion and revival

In 1392 the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) arranged a rapproche-
ment that ended the era of the divided courts and inaugurated a period of
relative peace and prosperity for both the court nobility and the military
aristocracy. More important than this change for the world of renga, how-
ever, was the gradual increase in the prominence of the military families
around the shogunate in the cultural affairs of the capital. Even before the
turn of the century, many daimyō were holding their own poetry gatherings.
And Yoshimitsu, while showing no great interest in poetry himself, spon-
sored a culture that continued to invest much in the arts. Beginning in 1391,
for instance, the shogunate started sponsoring ten-thousand-verse renga
festivals at Kitano Shrine, involving hundreds of courtiers, daimyo, and jige
masters. Records document eight such large-scale undertakings between 1391
and 1441. Thus, by the middle of the fifteenth century, renga was rivaling
waka in sheer popularity, especially in the provinces. Some of the finest poets
in the form – such as Takayama Sōzei (d. 1455), Chiun (d. 1448), Gyōjo
(1405–69), Senjun (1411–76), and Shinkei (1406–75) – are for that reason
known now almost solely for their renga, although the truth is that they
doubtless thought of themselves as competent in both forms.
The old hana no moto renga continued to be a staple of poetic culture even
at midcentury – a feature of the historical record that is obscured by the fact
that later poets actively excluded such works from anthologies. It is just as
clear, however, that renga had by that time become a central preoccupation
of elite society. The great waka poet Shōtetsu (1381–1459), who was a teacher
to all the poets mentioned immediately above, played a role in this by
encouraging his students to study the great waka anthologies of the past as
well as court classics such as Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji. The most
outstanding result of his effort is perhaps Shinkei, who studied under
Shōtetsu for thirty years. Like his teacher, Shinkei produced work in all
styles, claiming the entire tradition for his own. But it was for links like this
one from his Renga hyakkutsuke (A Hundred Tsukeku, 1468) that he would be
remembered:

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Omou kokoro zo My troubled heart

sora ni ukaruru floats up into the sky.
Karasu naku A crow caws –
shimoyo no tsuki ni as on a frosty, moonlit night,
hitori nete I lie down alone.
In his Sasamegoto (Murmured Conversations, 1463), Shinkei showed himself
to be one of the most sophisticated thinkers of the premodern Japanese
tradition. It is in his renga, perhaps, that we see how an essentially neoclassi-
cal form was also inscribed with a sense of absence in its inevitably fragmen-
ted vision of the court heritage. Yet, however profound (and potentially
subversive) the accomplishments of his finest work – which express his
aesthetic of hiesabi, the “chill and spare,” as well as the theme of existential
loneliness and Buddhist notions of non-duality and ephemerality – Shinkei’s
art generally stayed within traditional boundaries in terms of diction, ima-
gery, and conception. And his efforts did much to gain for linked verse what
Shinkei said he wanted for it: legitimacy within the broader waka tradition.
One indication of the success of Shinkei and his colleagues was the institu-
tional support renga began to receive from the shogunate – now the real power
in Kyoto politics, where the old nobility were in dire financial straits – in the
form of an official bureau of linked verse at Kitano Shrine, staffed by a laureate
(sōshō) who was sustained by a grant of income-lands. Thus, the shogunal
government, long an underwriter of waka, began to do the same for renga.
Small wonder, then, that the textual record shows a notable increase in surviv-
ing hyakuin from this era, as well as our first personal anthologies of the genre.

The renga master Sōgi and the florescence of the

genre
The warfare that overwhelmed Kyoto in the latter decades of the fifteenth
century obviously affected poets and their institutions. By that time, meeting
halls (kaisho) designed to facilitate communal art forms such as renga, tea
tasting, and flower arrangement were becoming a staple of elite architecture;
but the fires of war destroyed kaisho along with everything else, making
many artists into refugees. Shinkei, for instance, was forced to leave the
temple where he served as head priest and look to help from patrons in the
East Country, and similar journeys were undertaken by many literati of the
time. Ironically, however, this situation presented opportunites for practi-
tioners of a genre that recommended itself rather readily to the communal

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culture of warrior clans. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the life of the
monk Sōgi (1421–1502), a Zen monk who, more than any commoner poet
before, seems to have made an explicit decision to make a career for himself
as a rengashi (renga master), first by gaining the education in Chinese classics
and Buddhist texts that was available to priests and then moving on to seek
out teachers who could lead him on the Way of Poetry.
Sōgi’s origins are obscure. We know, however, that by around 1450 he was
making a name for himself among recognized renga masters, warlords, and
court aristocrats, the latter retaining status as holders of considerable cultural
capital despite their political losses. At the time of the Ōnin War (1467–77),
however, he left Kyoto for the East Country, where he stayed for nearly a
decade. His first two instruction manuals were written about this time, both
at the request of samurai students. Although he would eventually set up
house in Kyoto, travel would remain a crucial part of his life, which was one
way in which he differed from the masters of the previous generation, most
of whom spent much less time on the road. One explanation for this is that
the Ōnin War had had the effect of “dispersing” interest in Kyoto culture into
the provinces, creating a market for artists of all sorts. Another is that, while
the previous generation of renga masters had been supported by secular or
religious positions that left them little need to seek out patrons outside the
capital, Sōgi was from the beginning a professional who made his living from
his art.
In addition to meeting provincial patrons during his first trip to the East
Country, however, Sōgi also ended up meeting Shinkei there, as well as a
warrior poet named Tō no Tsuneyori (1401–84). A somewhat obscure
figure, Tsuneyori had been a member of Shōtetsu’s circle. More impor-
tantly for Sōgi’s purposes, he had also received the kuden (“secret oral
teachings”) on Kokinshū and other early waka texts from Shōtetsu’s rival,
Gyōkō (1391–1455), the explicit heir of Tonna. Sōgi met with Tsuneyori over
a period of some months in 1471–3, during which time he received the
coveted secret teachings and eventually a certificate naming him as
Tsuneyori’s chief disciple. With those credentials in hand, Sōgi then opened
up a literary practice in Kyoto in 1473. Soon he was involved in all levels of
literary discourse, playing the role of renga master with a number of
disciples, attending poetry gatherings at the noble houses, and even lectur-
ing on the court classics. His ambition even extended to establishing a
canon of linked verse by compiling an anthology to showcase his teachers,
which he titled Chikurinshō (The Bamboo Grove Collection, 1476), claiming
for those poets fame equal to that of a group of seven sages of the Three

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Kingdoms period in Chinese history who had met together in a bamboo

grove. The seven poets he included were his own teachers: Shinkei, Sōzei,
and Senjun, along with four others of the same generation. Other poets –
and there were others, especially those of the “hana no moto” tradition – he
excluded without comment. The collection thus made a clear statement,
both about Sōgi’s reading of the renga tradition and about his own growing
sense of authority in the poetic field.
As if to justify his selections, in 1479 Sōgi wrote a critical commentary on
selected links from Chikurinshō. Throughout the piece, called Oi no susami
(An Old Man’s Diversions), he concentrated on elucidating linking technique
while at the same time using terms of praise from the waka tradition,
implicitly adopting Shinkei’s contention that at bottom renga and waka
should be regarded as one and the same. Here and in his other critical
writings, however, he stopped short of endorsing Shinkei’s starker, more
cerebral aesthetic, adhering instead to the “gentler” ideals of the Nijō line:
profundity of feeling, beauty of form, and rhetorical restraint. His most
unreserved praise went to understated links like the following by Senjun
(Chikurinshō, link no. 1280), which, he said, “appear straightforward on the
surface but are full of profound meaning deep down.”
Mine kosu kaze ni On wind from over the peak –
ko no ha chiru oto the sound of leaves scattering.
Shiba no to o If someone asks
towaba nani ka to about life in my brush hut,
kotaemashi what am I to say?
Sōgi was a careful student of his predecessors, but he also had an agenda of
his own that went beyond them in some ways. This is particularly true in his
teachings on the art of linking, which he invariably couched in terms related
to actual experience in the za, or linking session, as he does in his Azuma
mondō (East Country Dialogues, 1467):
The Way of linked verse is to ponder deeply, indeed, to brood over one’s
links. Nevertheless there are times when, judging the needs of a whole
sequence, one may produce a simple verse that surpasses a distinctive
verse in total effect . . . One should understand that in this Way, one must
balance one’s own talents against the circumstances of the za, and compose
appropriately, without being overly modest or too forward.

Sōgi was not the first to stress the importance of cooperation in the
production of a renga sequence, but no one before him had been so empha-
tic. However topsy-turvy the world outside, he stressed that a renga

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gathering should be governed by standards of decorum whose tenor was not

merely aesthetic but also religious and ethical.
Given his emphasis on maintaining the proper atmosphere in a renga
gathering, it is no surprise that Sōgi is also regarded as the first renga master
to realize the full potential of the hyakuin. As if to further elucidate this point,
Sōgi wrote a complete running commentary on an example of the form (Yodo
no watari, 1495). Furthermore, he was involved in two such sequences with
his disciples Shōhaku and Sōchō that would become the most famous
hundred-verse sequences in the renga canon – Minase sangin hyakuin (Three
Poets at Minase, 1488) and Yuyama sangin hyakuin (Three Poets at Yuyama,
1491). Each would become the object of much later exegesis and commen-
tary, and not by scholars seeking to elucidate the “meaning” of links so much
as by poets interested in the texts as primers for practitioners of the art.
Sōgi was appointed Kitano Shrine renga laureate in 1488. More important
to him personally, however, was his involvement in compilation of a new
imperial renga anthology, called Shinsen Tsukubashū (The New Tsukuba
Collection, 1495). Predictably, he used the opportunity to further enshrine
the work of the seven sages, as well as that of himself and his own disciples.
But also well represented were his patrons – royals, court nobles, and
members of the military aristocracy – showing how socially prominent linked
verse had truly become.
Sōgi died in the East Country in 1502 where he had gone to meet with
patrons, but not before passing on his teachings (on renga and the “secrets” of
the waka tradition) to scores of poets at all levels of literate society, who
would staunchly follow his model of practice for the next half century or so.
Taking over renga leadership in Kyoto was a younger disciple, Sōseki
(1474–1533). It is a testament to Kyoto’s decline and to the emergence of
numerous cultural centers in the provinces, however, that it was mostly in
the latter that his foremost students pursued their art. Among these were
Shōhaku (1443–1527), who lived in Settsu province; Sōchō (1448–1532), who
lived most of his latter years in Suruga province; and Kenzai (1452–1510), a
student of both Shinkei and Sōgi who left the capital to practice his art in the
East Country. All of these poets left large renga anthologies, critical writings,
and travel writings that attest to their devotion to the courtly ideals articu-
lated by the Seven Sages and Sōgi.
Renga continued to rival the waka form in status and popularity for a
century after Sōgi’s departure from the scene. Yet all types of poetry had by
the mid 1500s become a form of commerce, and one in which even those at
the very top of the old social structure were centrally involved. Biographies of

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the Sōgi lineage of renga masters – including most prominently Sōseki,

Soboku (d. 1545), and Sōyō (d. 1563) – read like the travelogues of thorough
professionals working in an expanding literary market. And even renga poets
such as Satomura Jōha (1524–1602), who stayed in the capital, were rather
openly involved in activities that can easily be described as mercantile,
entailing not just manuscript work and lecturing but even giving guided
tours of the famous sites of the capital to visiting warlords.
It is no coincidence that encyclopedic reference works on the rules and
conventions of linked verse such as Mugonshō (Silent Notes, 1603) also
appeared at the end of this period, nor that Sōboku and others are credited
with writing verse-by-verse commentaries for numerous hundred-verse
sequences. New participants in elite culture were as anxious for such
study aids as they were for commentaries on The Tale of Genji. While the
divide between production and consumption of traditional poetry had not
yet become as wide as it would be in the Edo period, the new prominence of
exegetical activity in the 1500s is evidence that the texts of the past were
often being read by people who thought of themselves more as observers
than as full participants in poetic culture. It was at this time, too, that haikai
renga, “comic” or “unorthodox” linked verse, emerged as a discourse of its
own with the appearance of two anthologies, one called Chikuba kyōginshū
(Crazy Verses on Bamboo Stilts) and the other Inu tsukubashū (Mongrel
Tsukuba Collection). Such verses had been composed from the beginning,
but it was not until around the turn of the sixteenth century that they were
preserved. In time, mainstream renga masters were including supervision
of haikai sessions among their duties, catering to growing interest in the
form.
Yet many of the poets associated with early haikai – Yamazaki Sōkan,
Arakida Moritake (1473–1549), and Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), for
instance – thought of themselves as renga masters and only came to be
known as the “fathers” of haikai in later times. Furthermore, statements like
the following by Teitoku from Tensuishō (Waters from Heaven, 1644) show
that even after the beginning of the Edo period poets still connected haikai
composition with values that could be traced back to Yoshimoto and Sōgi.
In the za, one who wants to be considered a fine poet should remain quiet,
not desiring to compose a great number of verses. If he remains tranquil, the
hearts of the rest of those in the group will naturally be at peace and there
will be no competitiveness, no anger, but rather a spirit of propriety – each
praising the other, leading toward the true spirit of haikai.

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For Teitoku, haikai was a serious business that was still dominated by
elegant ideals where it mattered most in social terms – in comportment in the
za. This would also be true of the great haikai master Matsuo Bashō
(1644–94), who likewise embraced the ideal of harmony in the za as a high
priority. Haikai as it evolved in the 1600s would differ from orthodox linked
verse in rhetorical matters, but in terms of its social role as conceived by
Bashō and many of his disciples it was in its essence a differing articulation of
very old ideals, social harmony being one of them.

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 34
Noh drama
noel pinnington

About 2,500 different noh play scripts exist, of which some 240 are currently
maintained in the performance repertoire. Most of these 240 plays are a
subset of those performed by official noh schools in the mid seventeenth
century, which in turn had been composed between the mid fourteenth and
mid sixteenth centuries. The performance of these noh plays, along with
about two hundred kyōgen comic plays, and the ritual piece known as Okina
(Old Man), make up the current noh tradition.
Noh plays were composed as scripts, but their performance combines
song, dance, instrumental accompaniment, costume, and mask. Thus while
they can be treated as plays and read for literary purposes, they are generally
appreciated by audiences for all the technical arts they employ, music and
dance as well as the impersonation of the dramatis personae. In this chapter,
the focus will be primarily on the scripted elements of the plays. It should be
pointed out, however, that while the scripts more or less coalesced when
they were written (with some exceptions), the current performance style
became settled later. The noh performed today is largely a Muromachi art in
Tokugawa dress.
Noh plays can be discerned in historical records as far back as the late
thirteenth century, but scripts only survive from the early fifteenth century.
From what is known of plays from the interim period, it seems that they were
relatively free in organization, allowing multiple scenes in different locations,
and featuring a variety of characters. The plays of the time of the noted
playwright Zeami (1363?–1443?) and his pupils, however, were more con-
strained in structure. Three role types had become established: main roles,
performed by master actors (tōryō no shite), secondary roles by side actors
(waki no shite), and minor roles by comic actors (kyōgen no yaku). These
correspond to the current performing traditions of shite, waki, and ai-kyōgen.
In Zeami’s plays, the main role, which was sometimes doubled (for example,
into a pair of sisters), was greatly emphasized, and the other parts mainly

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existed to support it. The climax generally consisted of a long sung mono-
logue by the main role, followed by a dance. This form of play, in the hands of
Zeami, his sons, and son-in-law, is generally regarded as the high point in the
history of noh. In later generations, the structure again became more flexible,
with many actors on stage, more dialogue between roles, and more dramatic
action. The diction became less highly wrought and dance less significant.
Most plays up to this point featured figures derived from earlier literature,
myth, or legend. At the end of the medieval period, however, the warlord
Toyotomi Hideyoshi had plays written to stage his own exploits and he acted
in them, sometimes as himself and sometimes not. Warrior leaders after him
continued to enjoy both watching and performing in plays, but an ethos of
conservation became dominant among actors, especially from the mid
seventeenth century. Twenty lineages of performers, divided into shite,
waki, flute players, small drum players, hip drum players, stick drum players,
and kyōgen players, were chosen to receive regular stipends. In return they
had to submit records of their teachings and repertoires, and were expected
to preserve their inherited arts unchanged. The lists of plays offered up at that
time are the basis of the current repertoire. Plays have been written in the
modern era, but are regarded more in the way of experiments rather than as
noh proper.

Okina and the mythic origins of noh

Zeami’s account of events in his father’s lifetime is relatively trustworthy, but
his received lore of earlier times is not. A central idea in that lore is the
derivation of noh plays from a tradition of sixty-six mimes (monomane)
originating in the mythical age of the Japanese gods and used by the
Buddha’s followers in India. The sixty-six mimes were supposed to have
been progressively reduced, first in the late Heian period to a group of three,
known as Shikisanban (the three ritual pieces), each of which featured a
masked old man, and then to an even shorter version, Okina, with two old
men, which Zeami’s father, Kan’ami, performed before the Shogun
Yoshimitsu at Imagumano in the mid 1370s. Shikisanban was performed by
troupes at festivals in Nara, and Kan’ami did perform a shortened version
before the shogun, the basis of the current Okina.
Okina is widely performed nowadays in several versions: those belonging
to noh traditions, similar versions found in kabuki and puppet theater, and
also variant forms handed down in rural shrines. The piece as performed by
noh actors today features three main roles: an old man called Okina Omote, a

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youth called Senzai, and another old man called Sanbasō. It opens with the
main actor singing, in alternation with a chorus, a rhythmical series of
syllables “tō tō tarari tararira tarari agari rari tō . . .” Between some of these
lines emerges a celebratory imayō, a late Heian song (“May our lord live for a
thousand ages and we serve a thousand years . . .”). The younger Senzai then
sings another older song and performs a rhythmical dance. The main actor
dons an old man mask. As Okina Omote, he rises and addresses a third actor
with a version of an early Heian erotic song (saibara – “the two youngsters sat
out of each other’s reach . . .”). He intones a waka and some lines from a
Chinese verse, praying for peace in the realm and divine protection. When
finished, both actors leave the stage. At this point the third actor, having
donned a large black hat, runs out and dances a wild and vigorous piece called
the “Momi no dan.” He then dons an old man mask, and in the character of
Sanbasō banters with the young actor who brought on the masks at the start
of the performance. The younger actor hands over a bell-tree (suzu) and sits.
Sanbasō performs a final stately dance, the “suzu no dan,” after which both
actors withdraw.
This piece, believed to be similar to that performed before Yoshimitsu,
binds together scraps of old popular songs, celebratory and erotic, with a
variety of dances. Its function, and that of its earlier and longer forms,
generically referred to as okina sarugaku, was to pacify disruptive forces.
From the thirteenth century, as Shikisanban, it was offered to the Kasuga
shrines during the Indian New Year Buddhist festival (shūnie) at the Kōfukuji
Temple. There is an influential theory, originally proposed by Hattori Yukio,
that in fact okina sarugaku originated in the Heian period as a propitiatory
performance offered at the back of Tendai temples to avert the malevolent
gaze of a Chinese deity called Matarashin.
The Okina performance tradition shares some elements with that of noh
plays, but there are fundamental differences between the two, for example in
the structure of their masks and conventions of costume and dance. Noh
plays are generally thought actually to have had a different history, visible in a
series of historical references from the late thirteenth century to pieces called
sarugaku (or sarugō). On the one hand the term sarugaku (lit. “monkey
entertainment”) indicates a particular type of performance troupe and the
actors belonging to it. Thus there are sarugaku troupes and dengaku (lit. “field
entertainment”) troupes, respectively made up of sarugaku and dengaku
actors. On the other hand, sarugaku can also refer to a genre of performance
piece, a play, which was put on by a variety of groups of performers,
including both sarugaku troupes and dengaku troupes. The sarugaku troupes

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established in Yamato province divided their actors into two groups. One
consisted of elders who ran the troupe, and only performed Shikisanban. The
other included adults and youths and performed sarugaku plays.
Two historical records describe the content of sarugaku plays in 1349. The
first is a story in Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace), where the focus of
events is the disastrous collapse of viewing stands at a kanjin performance (a
public performance before a paying audience) put on by dengaku troupes in
Kyoto. Members of the higher classes were thrown into the midst of the
lower orders, who took the opportunity to steal weapons, abduct women,
and commit acts of violence. The play being performed at the time repre-
sented a miracle on Mount Hiei and featured a small boy in the guise of a
sacred monkey from the Sannō Shrine.
The second record tells of a performance of sarugaku and dengaku
programs put on at the Kasuga Shrine by priests and priestesses. The first
play from the sarugaku side portrayed an event in the thirteenth-century poet
Saigyō’s life when he offered ten poems for an imperial visit before renoun-
cing the world. The second enacted a visit by the Heian author Murasaki
Shikibu to the sick bed of the poetess Izumi Shikibu. On the dengaku side, the
first play told the legend of an imperial retainer who went to China and met a
master musician from whom he obtained three lutes (biwa) and three secret
melodies, only to be attacked by a dragon king on the return journey. The
second play portrayed a Buddhist story about a wicked Indian king and his
change of heart on hearing some Buddhist sermons.
The Ashikaga shoguns often saw dengaku performances, but they did not
see sarugaku troupes putting on plays until the 1370s when Kan’ami (1333–84,
also known as Kannami) performed before the third Ashikaga shogun,
Yoshimitsu, at the Imagumano Shrine in Kyoto. This was the beginning of
a new kind of patronage for favored sarugaku troupes. Warrior patronage
tended to be personal, focused on individual actors, with erotic overtones. It
is about this time troupes became known for their star actors, so Kan’ami’s
troupe became Kanze after the featured actor. Similarly, the names of the
other Yamato troupes – Komparu, Kongō, and Hōshō – were called after the
actors Komparu Gonnokami, Kongō Gonnokami, and Hōshō Dayū. Where
they could, star actors composed their own plays to show off their talents.

Kan’ami and Saemon Gorō

Two plays by Kan’ami and one by Saemon Gorō of the Enami troupe (in
Kyoto) may be taken as representative of this period. Kan’ami’s Sotoba

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Komachi (Komachi at the Stupa) consists of a series of scenes featuring the

Heian poet Ono no Komachi in old age. In the opening scene, two priests
remonstrate with an old woman leaning on an old wooden stupa, urging her
to treat it with more respect. (A stupa is a wooden post symbolizing the
Buddha, usually erected to mark a grave.) To their surprise, she refuses and
uses Buddhist arguments to justify her behavior. She then admits to the
priests her identity as the erstwhile Heian poet. In a second scene, the spirit of
a former lover takes possession of her body and complains of his lust and
bitterness. In a final scene, the old woman goes to a nearby shrine and prays
that the spirit of her former lover might be exorcised.
This play is a vehicle for a series of complex impersonations – especially
interesting would be that of an old woman possessed by a male ghost. The
argumentative exchange in the first scene is a key section. There is a strong
contrast between Komachi’s and the priests’ voices. Komachi’s introductory
words are a clever variation on a former poem, almost comic. A witty and
polemical mood pervades her assertions. The priests are literal, pedestrian,
and smug. Komachi constantly shifts her ground, citing Buddhist texts,
indirectly attacking the priests’ view of themselves, arguing about the nature
of religious motivation.
Jinen Koji (The Lay-Priest Jinen) is another of Kan’ami’s plays. Jinen was a
Kamakura Zen priest who left the monastery and traveled the countryside
preaching, singing, and dancing. In Kan’ami’s play, a young girl offers a robe
to Jinen in exchange for a Buddhist service for her dead parents. After child
slavers lead her away, Jinen realizes that she has sold herself to them to pay
for the robe. He follows the slavers down to the riverside and tries to
persuade them to take back the robe and release the girl. In the end the
slavers give way, but demand that Jinen perform various dances for them so
that they get something out of the deal. This play also features argumentative
exchanges, this time between Jinen and the slavers. Like Komachi, Jinen
expresses his point of view through striking word plays based on double
meanings and clever twists. The dances that Jinen performs are kusemai, a
type of syncopated song and dance in which Kan’ami specialized. Kan’ami’s
plays are freer in form than those of his son Zeami, and dramatize conflicts of
attitude with remarkable sustained dialogues. They are unique among noh
plays in that they discuss critically the true nature of Buddhist morality and
confront gritty social issues.
The play Ukai (The Cormorant Fisher) is important as a forerunner of later
ghost plays. Its author was Saemon Gorō of the Enami troupe, active in
Kyoto. As Zeami revised the version that survives, there are different

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opinions as to what is original. The cormorant fisherman goes out on the

river on a moonless night with a flaming torch to attract fish to the surface of
the water. Small rings around the necks of the cormorants prevent them
swallowing the fish they catch, which are regurgitated. Ukai is one of a
number of plays concerned with the anxiety felt by those whose ways of
life involved killing: fishermen, hunters, and of course warriors. Early
Japanese Buddhist stories often mentioned the hells that await those who
take life. In the medieval period, with the shift to a psychological conception
of Buddhism, the primary issue had come to be the degree of mental
attachment to killing rather than the killing itself.
The play opens with a pattern typical of later ghost plays: two traveling
priests looking for a place to stay the night are directed to a haunted shrine
overlooking the river. Once they are there, the main actor comes on in the
guise of a cormorant fisher. His entrance song sets up the central image of the
play: “The bright torches in the cormorant boats, but what about the dark
paths that follow!” Eventually he admits he is the ghost of a fisherman
drowned by locals to avoid evil karma associated with his trade. The priests
ask him to enact his evil deeds as a form of confession after which they will
pray for his soul. He mimes fishing while the chorus sings of the pleasure and
dread involved in fishing. Throughout the play the ghost refers to the
moment when the torches are extinguished. This image gathers a number
of figurative meanings: excitement followed by anxiety in the act of sin; a life
of pleasure followed by punishment in hell; finally the sinking back to hell of a
ghost after temporary return to the world. The image is enriched by a
contrast made between the torch and the moon. Those above the clouds of
delusion love the moon, generally associated with enlightenment, whereas
the deluded prefer ignorance, dark nights, when the false light, the torch,
brings pleasure rather than joy.
Ukai and many other plays were written by performers, but it must be
noted that once the shōgun became interested, people in his circle
started to take an active hand in fostering the sarugaku arts. These
literati and musical experts took names ending in the suffix -ami, and
include Naami, Seiami (aka Iami, Jōami), and Rin’ami. In particular,
Naami seems to have influenced musical chanting, Rin’ami set a pattern
of highly allusive diction through songs he composed, and Seiami,
apparently in service to Yoshimitsu’s doctor, wrote plays that initiated
future genres, including a warrior play called Michimori, based on a story
in the Heike monogatari and a play about the emotional reunion of
parents and child, known as Tango monogatari.

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Zeami
The shogun Yoshimitsu was in his late teens when he first saw Kan’ami
perform. He subsequently took the twelve-year-old Zeami as a companion,
probably more for his beauty than for his skill as an actor. Yoshimitsu had a
passion for attractive boys; noble families competed to send him good-
looking companions. But at least by Kan’ami’s death in 1384, Yoshimitsu
had taken up a new favorite, Inuō of the Ōmi regional troupes. Inuō, on
whom Yoshimitsu bestowed the name Dōami, had developed a refined
performance style, atmospheric and smooth. It exemplified the quality
known as yūgen, elegant and subtle, closely associated with medieval images
of Heian aristocratic life. Zeami, too, adopted this yūgen style.
Zeami’s importance in the tradition of noh plays derives not so much from
his fame as an actor in his lifetime, but rather from the fact that his style of
play came to dominate the later repertoire. Thirty-eight plays are definitely
attributed to him (including, in addition to plays discussed below, Hanjo,
Kinuta, Saigyōzakura, Sekidera Komachi, Semimaru, and Yamamba), and he is
likely the author of many more. In Zeami’s youth, actors from dengaku,
Ōmi, and Yamato troupes all wrote plays. In his old age, however, Zeami
reported that only Yamato troupes were still writing new plays. Zeami wrote
a guide to his tradition of composing plays called Sandō (The Three Paths),
which provided beginning authors with a formulaic method. Plays were
classified by their primary role: an old person, a woman, or a warrior. A
basic structure was first defined for the old person play. It consisted of three
progressively faster tempi – called jo, ha, and kyū – distributed over five
sections, defined in terms of a series of specific song patterns, with set syllable
counts. The first section had the side actor enter, identify himself, and
establish his location, the second had the main actor enter and sing a series
of short passages, the third consisted of a dialogue between the main and side
actor(s), the fourth had a long monologue, usually a kusemai, and in the fifth
the old person, transformed into his or her real identity, usually some kind of
deity, sang a series of songs, and performed a dance before quitting the stage.
Having set up this basic pattern for “old person” plays, Zeami proposed
variations to suit other types of roles.
This schematic approach to playwriting, which has been likened to the
setting up of musical forms like the sonata, was probably developed for
pedagogical purposes and not intended to limit creativity. Zeami’s own
plays modified these structures to suit a wide range of topics and moods.
The content of his plays reflected the passion of Kyoto high society for the

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classical literature of the Heian court and the Heike monogatari. In his diction,
Zeami alluded to Heian poetry, but grammatically he exploited the unde-
termined, open-ended possibilities of medieval renga (linked verse). Whereas
Kan’ami’s dialogues had represented the conflicting viewpoints of indivi-
duals, open disagreement was avoided in Zeami’s works. Everything was
refined, with smooth elegance valued and jarring notes avoided. What
tension did exist was within the individual, in inner conflict or psychic
instability. Zeami preferred ellipsis and emphasized unity, often by the use
of a repeated image (tōshō).
Zeami wrote several god plays (waki no noh), commonly performed as
opening pieces in a program to establish a sacred and positive atmosphere.
(Several plays were generally performed in a program, interspersed with
kyōgen comedies). The play Takasago, sections of which are now commonly
sung at weddings, is perhaps the best known of these. The story derives from
commentaries on a phrase in an introduction to the Kokinshū (Collection of
Japanese Poems Old and New, c. 905–14): “The pines of Takasago and
Suminoe should be felt to share the same birth.” The idea had developed
that the phrase in question was recommending that the sacred trees at the
Takasago and Sumiyoshi (once called Suminoe) shrines, despite being geo-
graphically separated, should be felt to spring from the same spot. In the play
this is converted into a vision of an old man and his wife, aging together but
living in separate places, who turn out to be the spirits of the pine trees of
Takasago and Sumiyoshi. The language of the spirits throughout the play is
richly poetic, using the techniques of waka (double meanings, allusion,
association) to construct a layering of auspicious ideas linking happy mar-
riage, a peaceful and blessed realm, the Japanese poetic tradition, the wisdom
of trees, and long life.
The ultimate achievement of Zeami’s style is generally taken to be the so-
called two-part mugen (phantasmagoric) noh. In this type of play a disturbed
person appears to a priest in the first scene, and then reappears in his or her
true form as a ghost in the second. Often this second scene is understood as
the priest’s dream, evaporating when he wakes up at the end. Izutsu, con-
sidered by some the greatest of all noh plays, is a classic mugen play, closely
matching Zeami’s prescriptions in Sandō. It draws on commentaries on the
Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise) that read into certain sections of the work a
story of a love affair between the ninth-century poet Ariwara no Narihira and
an aristocratic woman, daughter of Ki no Aritsune. An elegant mood is
sustained throughout. The play deepens, however, from nostalgia and long-
ing to despair at the impossibility of emotional satisfaction. There is a

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moment of apparent fulfillment, when the central character, the ghost of

Aritsune’s daughter, has a vision of identity with her former lover (the play’s
climactic moment), but it is an illusion that fades away.
Another important group of plays by Zeami features the ghosts of war-
riors. He considered warrior roles generally unattractive, but, perhaps fol-
lowing the example of Seiami’s Michimori, made an exception for the
aristocratic warriors of the Genpei War, who could be conceived of as
possessing courtly elegance. Zeami’s Yorimasa and Tadanori both follow the
basic mugen pattern in which a wandering priest meets a man who then
reappears in his dream as a ghost to tell his story. In Sanemori the warrior’s
ghost appears to a Pure Land preacher who alone is able to see him. In
Kiyotsune, a wife, receiving a lock of black hair as a keepsake, is visited by her
husband’s ghost to tell the story of his suicide. The most unusual of the
warrior plays is Atsumori, because it is about the psychology of two warriors,
the elder Kumagai, who has abandoned war and taken vows as the priest
Renshō, and the boy he killed on the battlefield, the flute-playing Atsumori.
At the start of the play, Renshō, the waki role, goes to the site of the battle to
pray for the peace of Atsumori’s soul. He hears a flute and finds a group of
peasant youths coming toward him. Questioned by Renshō, their leader
admits to being Atsumori’s ghost and quits the stage. In the second half, he
reappears in warrior costume, and there is an exchange in which the two men
reenact their former enmity. In conclusion, however, they agree to become
“friends in the (Buddhist) law.” At the climax, Atsumori brandishes his sword
to attack Renshō, but then recalling the priest’s prayers on his behalf he calms
down. The chorus sings that the two men will eventually be reborn on the
same lotus seat in the Pure Land. Zeami wrote a large number and variety of
plays. Generally, however, they reflect his stated ideals: they are based on
court literature and its commentaries and are atmospheric, with a refined
elegance and a single climax. His plays amount to progressive psychological
uncoverings, exposing what lies beneath. Rather than tell stories directly,
they explore inner worlds.

Sarugaku troupes after Zeami

When Zeami died, life in the capital was more unstable and fragmented than
it had been in his youth. The well-organized polity of Yoshimitsu’s time soon
collapsed. The Ōnin civil war broke out in 1467 and lasted ten years. It was a
disaster for Kyoto and aristocratic culture; much of the capital was laid waste.
Shoguns, however, continued to patronize noh. Zeami’s son Motomasa

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(1400?–1432) (Sumidagawa, Morihisa, Yoroboshi) was to predecease him, but he

and Zeami’s son-in-law, Zenchiku (1405–70?) (Teika, Bashō, Yōkihi) of the
Komparu troupe, wrote plays more or less in Zeami’s style. Their works
are highly poetic in diction, focused, and elegant.
Motomasa’s plays include some concerned with the sadness of parents
separated from their children by misfortune or death. The most well known
is Sumidagawa (River Sumida), in which a cultured woman of Kyoto, driven
to madness by the abduction of her young boy by slavers, searches for him in
the Eastern provinces. In the first part, in an extraordinary argumentative
exchange, the ferryman at River Sumida refuses to let her aboard the ferry
unless she “raves” to entertain the other passengers. She in turn superim-
poses on her travels Ariwara Narihira’s famous journey to the East as told in
Ise monogatari, a vision the ferryman mocks and resists. There is a cruel and
comic undertone to this part that only intensifies the pathos of the final scene
where the mother is cured by the vision of the ghost of her son, who turns
out to have died of illness at the same spot a year before.
Zenchiku’s plays are marked by alliteration, exhaustive allusion, and a
cyclic structure. One of them, Bashō (Plantain), is a member of a subgenre
that features spirits of plants. In the first half of the play, the main character
appears as a middle-aged woman who visits a hermit devoted to reading the
Lotus Sutra. They discuss the Tendai doctrine that even inanimate objects
can attain enlightenment. The woman quits the stage, but returns at night as
the spirit of a plantain tree. She sings about the natural world, dances, and
then fades away as dawn breaks. Zenchiku’s treatment gathers a whole series
of allusions to plantains from Chinese culture, where its fragility made it a
symbol of transience, and layers them into a complex and evocative texture.
This exhaustive use of allusion around specific tropes is typical of his plays.
A quite different series of dramatic plays were written, later attributed to a
certain Miyamasu, and another style called furyū was also developed that
emphasized visual spectacle. Prime examples of the Miyamasu plays are
Genbuku Soga (Soga Comes of Age) and Chōbuku Soga (Soga Vengeance). It is
unclear who Miyamasu was; the name could refer to various people from the
1430s to the end of the century. Among the stories these plays dramatized many
were taken from popular accounts of the warriors of the Soga family or
Minamoto Yoshitsune, or stories set in the provinces. The Miyamasu plays
feature relations between parents and children, lords and retainers, or brothers,
and have numerous dramatis personae, often including the use of child actors
for noble characters. They have dramatic themes such as violent revenge or
miraculous apparitions. Linguistically they are more straightforward than

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Zeami’s, and include comic or parodic elements. The stories proceed via
dialogue, there are few songs and no dances. In these plays the shite (who
specialized in song and dance) and the waki (who did not dance) were more
equal in importance. Often they represented mutually opposed voices.
Miyamasu’s plays develop characteristics rejected by Zeami and Yoshimitsu,
and, although they are sometimes regarded as second-rate or melodramatic,
they were both popular and influential.
Another important playwright was Kanze Nobumitsu (Funabenkei,
Momijigari, Rashōmon) (1435–1516), seventh son of Zeami’s successor,
Onnami. He was a drummer but skilled in chanting too, and also played an
important role in the management of the Kanze troupe over several genera-
tions of short-lived main actors. He was prominent after the Ōnin War. The
shogun’s government and the Nara monasteries had lost wealth and influ-
ence, and actors could no longer solely rely on them for patronage; instead
they had to appeal to the broader community, new religious institutions like
the Honganji Temple, or provincial warrior leaders, who were keen to take
lessons in noh chanting and dance. In this new environment, Nobumitsu, like
Miyamasu, broadened the focus of plays beyond a single central role, and he
also intensified their spectacular or visual aspects, with gorgeous costumes,
dances, and songs, as well as elaborate props, characteristics of plays now
referred to as furyū.
Nobumitsu left about thirty plays, thirteen of which are still performed.
Hardly any of his works are mugen noh, rather they represent fantastic places
from distant countries, ancient myths, or heroic stories, where dragons,
tigers, gods, and demons might be seen, stolen treasures retrieved, secrets
of martial arts learned, or ghosts of warriors threaten murder. These themes
present opportunities for splendid costumes and dramatic poses. Funabenkei
(Benkei at the Bridge) is still a popular piece with various novel aspects. It
concerns Yoshitsune, who is in the provinces with his lover the dancing girl
Shizuka Gozen, avoiding his suspicious brother, the warrior leader
Yoshitomo. Benkei tries to persuade Shizuka to return to the capital. She
agrees, gives a farewell dance, and leaves. Benkei and Yoshitsune then set out
to sea with some retainers only to be attacked by the ghost of Taira no
Tomonori who rises out of the water and tries to drag Yoshitsune into the
sea. The same shite actor who plays the dancing girl in the first half appears as
the ghost of the warrior Tomomori in the second, while Yoshitsune is played
by a child. These dramatic plays clearly aim at different effects from Zeami’s
plays. Nobumitsu’s heir Nagatoshi (1488–1541) (Enoshima, Shōzon, Rinzō)
continued to write plays in the same style.

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Zenchiku’s grandson, Komparu Zenpō (1454–1532?) (Arashiyama, Ikuta

Atsumori, Ikkaku Sennin, Hatsuyuki) was another playwright in the Sengoku
period who wrote plays with intense visual effects. His plays are structurally
utterly different from Zeami’s. An example is his play Hatsuyuki (First Snow),
which has no waki roles at all. The action takes place in real time, with a
serving woman (kyōgen) discovering that her mistress’s pet chicken has died,
and reporting it to her mistress (shite), daughter of a priest at the Izumi
Shrine. The mistress then calls other upper-class women to participate in a
prayer session for her pet’s rebirth in the Pure Land. After their prayers, a
child actor in the role of the chicken appears to them in a vision and dances,
celebrating its entrance into heaven. Apparently the theme of this play itself
came to Zenpō in a dream. Others of his plays take up the old theme of ghosts
appearing to the living. In Ikuta Atsumori (Atsumori in Ikuta), a young boy
brought up by a priest discovers that his father is the dead warrior Atsumori,
and is directed by the Kamo deity to a forest in Ikuta, a rural location, where
he will be able to see his father’s ghost. The boy travels to Ikuta and the dead
Atsumori appears to him. Atsumori describes the battle in which he died,
whereupon demons appear and drag him back to hell. In this play, the
demons are described but not seen, but in another of Zenpō’s plays,
Yakamochi, concerning the poet of that name, the demons from hell actually
appear with a burning cart and try to drag a girl off with them.
There are unattributed plays like Adachigahara which intersperses horrific
scenes with comic ones. The plays of the middle period, by Zeami,
Motomasa, and Zenchiku, are regarded as the true masterpieces of the
theater, but, from another viewpoint, one can see them as exceptions stand-
ing outside a more dramatic tradition linking Enami Saemon Gorō, Kan’ami,
Miyamasu, and Nobumitsu. Moreover, plays once written were not pre-
served unchanged. Actors modified their performances to suit audience
tastes. Changes in the overall construction of plays were not uncommon
up to the second half of the fifteenth century, and many alterations were
made to phrasing in the subsequent century. Vocal music, dances, gestures,
and the pace of plays have all radically changed from the time of Zeami.

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Noh drama theory from Zeami to
Zenchiku
arthur h. thornhill iii

Nōgakuron (noh drama treatises) is a modern term that refers to theoretical

writings on the performance, composition, and aesthetics of sarugaku (lit-
erally, “monkey music”), the medieval stage art that evolved into noh drama.
The first extant treatise, Fūshi kaden (Transmission of the Flower through Style
and Form, 1400–18; popularly known as Kadensho), was written by the seminal
figure in the history of noh, the performer and playwright Zeami Motokiyo
(1363–1443?). Zeami’s collected theoretical writings, along with those of his
son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku (or Ujinobu, 1405–70?), form the primary
corpus of nōgakuron. As is typical of medieval artistic treatises, they present
the process of an actor’s training as a quasi-spiritual discipline, a Way (michi).
At the same time, nōgakuron were secret writings, intended to bestow upon
one’s hereditary disciples a professional advantage over the performers of
rival troupes. Prior to the twentieth century, these works were held privately,
and only a spurious version of Kadensho circulated during the Edo period.
Yoshida Tōgo published a collection of sixteen Zeami works in 1909; addi-
tional manuscripts were later discovered and published, and Zeami is now
considered a major intellectual figure of the Muromachi period. The first
authoritative collection of Zenchiku’s twenty-three treatises, edited by Îto
Masayoshi and Omote Akira, was published in 1969.

Zeami’s treatises
Zeami was the son of Kan’ami Kiyotsugu (1333–84), a talented sarugaku
performer from Yamato province whose Yūzaki troupe was admired at a
Kyoto performance in 1374 by the young shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu
(1358–1408, r. 1368–94). Smitten by Zeami, Yoshimitsu provided him with an
education in the literary arts of waka (Japanese poetry) and renga (linked
verse), under the tutelage of the eminent poet Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–88). As a
result, Zeami was exposed to the tradition of artistic treatises, especially karon

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(treatises on the composition of Japanese poetry). In order to develop the

prestige of his art, and to codify his personal knowledge for his artistic
successors, he composed approximately twenty theoretical works over a
span of roughly thirty years.
Zeami’s early treatises are driven by a tension between two contrasting
ideals, yūgen and monomane. The specialty of Yamato sarugaku was the art
of monomane (imitation) – the mimetic, compelling portrayal of dramatic
roles. In contrast, the rival Ōmi sarugaku troupes featured the yūgen
(literally, “faint and dark”) style of graceful lyricism – song and dance at
the expense of dramatic action. In the world of medieval waka, yūgen is the
style of “mystery and depth,” of surface simplicity that suggests emotional
profundity, but in sarugaku the term had a simpler meaning of “graceful
beauty.” Zeami’s innovation was to merge the monomane and yūgen
styles, in part by emphasizing early training in the nikyoku (Two Arts) of
song and dance, in order to develop lyrical grace. Only later was role-
playing emphasized, through the rigorous study of three foundational
models (santai, Three Roles): the rōtai (Aged), the nyotai (Woman), and
the guntai (Martial).
The most prominent aesthetic ideal in Zeami’s writings is hana, the
Flower. This is freshness and appeal on stage that is inherently ephemeral.
Hana will appear at different times in a performer’s career, in different forms;
it is his responsibility to constantly grow and adapt to take advantage of this
process, in order to maintain freshness. In Fūshi kaden, Zeami differentiates
this transitory flower from a true flower; the latter does not fade. Inverting
the famous botanical metaphor found in Ki no Tsurayuki’s Kana Preface to
the Kokinshū (“The poetry of Yamato takes as its seed (tane) the human heart
(kokoro), and burgeons forth in a myriad leaves of words”), he writes, hana wa
kokoro, tane wa waza narubeshi (“The Flower must be the mind, its seed
artistic technique”). In other words, a performer’s art matures when he
understands how to create a sense of rarity on stage; after years of perfecting
specific roles through physical training, he attains mental mastery of their
effects. To illustrate Zeami quotes from Liuzu Tanjing (Platform Sutra,
J. Rokuso dankyō), invoking a model of Buddhist self-cultivation that results
in the attainment of wisdom. Once this mastery is attained, practice and
realization are inseparable, in the logic of Sōtō Zen.
Zeami’s insistence on the proper sequence of training is often articulated
through elaborate numbered typologies. The most famous of these is found
in the late treatise Kyūi (Nine Ranks, c. 1428). Zeami divides nine styles of
performance into three groups: “Upper Three Flowers” (nos. 1–3), “Middle

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Three Ranks” (nos. 4–6), and “Lower Three Ranks” (nos. 7–9).1 However,
Zeami’s initial ranking does not represent the proper pedagogical order. A
student does not begin at the bottom and work his way to the top. Rather, it
is best to begin by studying the middle three levels, then the upper three.
Thus, the proper course is to progress from no. 6 through to no. 1, finally
attaining the Wondrous Flower, “that level beyond words, where the actor’s
inward design and outward appearance are wondrously indivisible.” The
learning of these six levels is a centripetal process that results in a transcen-
dent effect on stage when the highest rank is attained.
But the master actor need not stop here. He may proceed to indulge in the
three lower styles, even though these lie outside the realm of yūgen and
should be avoided earlier in one’s career, simply “to amuse himself.” He
brings a special ability to the performance of these base roles, transforming
them into highly expressive vehicles. In other works, this advanced stage is
equated with the kyakurai fū (Style of Return), echoing the Zen ideal of the
enlightened master who returns to the secular world, having transcended the
duality of sacred and profane.
Zeami is also famous for his extensive treatment of jo-ha-kyū. Originally
terms used in the court music of gagaku, jo, ha, and kyū are best known as
principles of tempo, applied to a program of plays, sections of a play, and
even individual lines of vocalization. Jo represents a slow, stately opening, ha
is the development or quickening of pace, and kyū is the climax, the resolu-
tion that is always performed at a rapid tempo. This progression is considered
important because it produces in the audience a sense of “fulfillment” (jōju).
In fact, the forms of the natural world tend to follow this rhythm, and so a
successful performance should mimic them. In Shūgyoku tokka (Gathering
Jewels, Attaining the Flower, 1428), Zeami writes,

All forms of creation – good and bad, large and small, sentient and insentient –
each and every one possesses its own jo-ha-kyū. Even within the chirping of
birds and the cries of insects, each call has its own allotted pattern, which is
jo-ha-kyū.

Again there are echoes of Tsurayuki’s Kana Preface, which proclaims that the
sounds of birds in the field and frogs in the stream are no different than

1
Upper Three Flowers: 1. The Wondrous Flower (myōka fū), 2. The Flower of Profundity
(chōshinka fū), 3. The Flower of Tranquility (kanka fū). Middle Three Ranks: 4. The True
Flower (shōka fū), 5. Versatility and Precision (kōshō fū), 6. Early Beauty (senmon fū). Lower
Three Ranks: 7. Strength and Delicacy (gōsai fū), 8. Strength and Coarseness (gōso fū), 9.
Coarseness and Dullness (soen fū).

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human song, which has its own spontaneous, innate rhythm – the 5–7–5–7–7
cadence of Japanese poetry.
Surprisingly, Zeami wrote only one treatise on the art of playwriting,
Sandō (The Three Paths). The three essential components are shu (seed, the
selection of an appropriate protagonist role), saku (proper structure, based on
jo-ha-kyū), and sho (writing, the fleshing out of the text with appropriate
literary flourish). For woman plays, the ideal protagonist roles are Heian
court ladies. These are the foundation of yūgen, and the highest flower of
yūgen is found in the portrayal of court ladies possessed by human spirits –
for example, Yūgao, Aoi, and Ukifune in The Tale of Genji. For warrior plays
based on characters from the Genpei War, Zeami advocates presentation
closely modeled on The Tales of the Heike narrative, presumably for the sake of
audience familiarity, and also because the Kaku’ichi Heike text embraces the
courtly, artistic accomplishments of the Taira, and thus is compatible with
the yūgen style of performance. Throughout, his advice is to choose a
honzetsu (original story) conducive to artistic display and to embellish the
libretto with traditional poetic associations of the locale and season, even if
these are not directly connected to the honzetsu. For example, the warrior
play Atsumori is set at Suma Bay, evoking poetry associated with Ariwara
Yukihira and Genji, both exiled at Suma and celebrated in Heian court
literature. This literary mindset is evidence of Zeami’s transformation from
popular entertainer to neoclassical playwright, fully at home in the aristo-
cratic culture of his mentor Yoshimoto and his patron Yoshimitsu.

Komparu Zenchiku
Late in his career, Zeami found himself hard-pressed to designate a suitable
artistic successor. Devastated by the sudden death of his talented son
Motomasa and frustrated by a falling out with his nephew On’ami, the
recipient of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori’s patronage, Zeami turned to
his son-in-law, Komparu Zenchiku. Zenchiku was head of the Komparu
troupe – originally known as the Emai-za, the oldest of the Yamato sarugaku
troupes – whose actors played the most prestigious roles at the annual
performances in Nara before the Southern Great Gate of Kōfuku-ji and at
the Wakamiya Festival of Kasuga Shrine. Zenchiku married Zeami’s daugh-
ter while in his mid-twenties, but remained head of the Komparu troupe; it is
possible that Zeami’s wife was of Komparu lineage. After a period of intense
misgiving about Zenchiku’s abilities as a performer, Zeami relented and

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entrusted him with his teachings, determined to preserve the art he inherited
from his father Kan’ami.
In an early treatise, Kabu zuinōki (Record of the Essentials of Song and
Dance, c. 1455), Zenchiku reveals his deep fascination with waka. While
Zeami’s plays are replete with poetic allusions and feature famous waka
poets as protagonists, Zenchiku goes further, proclaiming that the art of
poetry is the essence of song and dance. This may be the result of his personal
fascination with the poetry and treatises of Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241), an
attitude inherited from his acquaintance and likely mentor, the poet Shōtetsu
(1381–1459). Kabu zuinōki contains notes on forty-seven plays, grouped into
four categories: the Three Roles of Zeami and a miscellaneous group. One of
Zeami’s Nine Ranks and one of Teika’s Ten Styles (jittei) are identified with
each play, a few brief remarks are appended, and one or more waka (and
occasionally a couplet from a Chinese poem) are recorded. The poems, taken
from an apocryphal Teika treatise, seldom appear within the text of the play
itself; rather, they are meant to express its poetic essence. This work opens
with the rhetorical flourish typical of prefaces to waka anthologies, and the
catalog of styles is reminiscent of karon (waka treatise). In contrast, Zeami’s
writings read more like a personal notebook.
Zenchiku is best known for his original theoretical construct rokurin ichiro,
“six circles and one dewdrop.” The first of these symbolic categories, termed
the Circle of Longevity (jurin), represents a state of visual and emotional
tranquility on stage before motion begins. “Longevity” connotes the infinite
life of constantly circulating breath, the foundation for both sound and move-
ment. The symbol of the jurin is an empty circle, representing stasis and also
infinite potential. The second stage is the Circle of Height (shurin), where
movement begins, sound arises from a ground of tranquil formlessness, and
emotional response is first experienced by the audience, emerging from the
“vessel” of the first circle. The third Circle of Abiding (jūrin) symbolizes the
mental ease of the performer as he smoothly generates a continuous flow of
individually differentiated movements and sounds. The centrifugal sequence of
these first three circles – associated with body, speech, and mind, respectively –
is described as the foundation of yūgen that underlies all successful roles.
The next three circles shift to the realm of manifest style. In the fourth realm,
the Circle of Forms (zōrin), the circle symbolizes a mirror in which the forms of
monomane – specifically, the Three Roles – are reflected. Thus yūgen is the
underlying essence of monomane, an implicit reversal of Zeami’s early view
that yūgen is a surface beauty supported by the underlying foundation of
monomane skills. The next stage, the Circle of Breaking (harin), denotes a

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more advanced stage in the actor’s career when the vulgar roles represented by
Zeami’s lowest three ranks are performed, but in Zenchiku’s words, “the
tranquility of the upper three circles is not lost.” The final Circle of
Emptiness (kūrin) is a representation of “no-form”: once the tranquil images
reflected in the fourth circle are destroyed by the turbulence of the fifth, a
beauty which has no discernible characteristic, the highest art of all, remains.
This is the province of the aged actor, celebrated in language derived from
Zeami: “Advancing further and further, song and dance wither: the appearance
of a flower that remains on an old tree. The art becomes one of diminishing,
and finally no style, as it returns to the original Circle of Longevity.” The final
One Dewdrop (ichiro) is described as the symbolic essence that links all six
circles, but it has no significance as an artistic principle.
The first extant rokurin ichiro manuscript, Rokurin ichiro no ki (Record of
Six Circles and One Dewdrop, 1455), contains two learned commentaries,
composed by the Buddhist priest Shigyoku (1383–1463), abbot of the Kaidan-in
at Tōdaiji in Nara, and Ichijō Kanera (or Kaneyoshi, 1402–81), the famous
scholar and court official. Shigyoku presents Buddhist cognates: for example,
the Circle of Longevity is proclaimed to represent the Kegon teaching of “one
source of motion and stillness,” and the middle four circles are aligned with
the Four Characteristics (shisō) of existence (birth, abiding, change, and
extinction). Kaneyoshi responds with a primarily Confucian analysis, equat-
ing the Four Qualities (Ch. si-de) of the Creative (Qian, the first hexagram of
the Yi jing) with the middle four circles, and the Neo-Confucian principle of
the Great Ultimate (Ch. tai-ji) with the Circle of Emptiness.
Shigyoku and Kaneyoshi provide little practical advice on the art of
performance, but Zenchiku himself became increasingly absorbed in the
intellectual and religious implications of their commentaries. In later rokurin
ichiro treatises he incorporates their categorizations, and also assigns his own
cognates drawn from the writings of Watarai Shinto and Yoshida Shinto.
Forced into retreat by the political turmoil of the Ōnin War (1467–77),
Zenchiku took solace in sarugaku as devotional act, as religious ritual
performed before the gods, explicitly rejecting any desire for the worldly
gain and prestige enjoyed by Zeami during the glorious reign of Yoshimitsu.
Among Zenchiku’s later works, most noteworthy is Shidō yōshō (Notes on
the Essentials of Attaining the Way, 1467). Here he distinguishes two modes of
yūgen: a pleasurable style (yūkyoku), also found in Zeami, that represents “roles
of playful disorder; murmuring softly, the willows and cherries flutter in the
breeze,” and yūgen-on, an essential yūgen style of profundity. For the first time
in his writings, Zenchiku explicitly equates yūgen with Buddha Nature. Since

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all things possess Buddha Nature, all roles – even fearsome demons, which
Zeami had discouraged his disciples from performing – can exhibit yūgen when
performed with the requisite lightness and “penetration.” This notion of
universal yūgen is consistent with present-day noh, where the entire repertoire
is performed with extreme concentration and graceful elegance.
The treatises of Zeami and Zenchiku provide invaluable insight into the
formative years of noh drama. Zeami’s “performance notes” are fragmentary
but intensely personal documents. We see him developing his family’s stage art in
new directions, reacting to professional and personal vicissitudes. At the same
time, his extensive circle of acquaintances – the shogun, Zen priests, Confucian
scholars, poets, musicians – provide a rich intellectual and literary vocabulary to
articulate his artistic vision. Zenchiku’s writings can be seen as an explicit blue-
print of this creative environment, as the composite of his symbolic rokurin ichiro
system and the two commentaries of Shigyoku and Kaneyoshi form a microcosm
of the dominant intellectual and cultural creeds of the Muromachi period.
Nōgakuron emerge in the “high medieval” age, taking on many of the
mature characteristics of treatises on waka, the most prestigious of the michi
arts. For example, Fūshi kaden constructs an authoritative history of sarugaku,
reaching back to the era of Shōtoku Taishi (574–622) and even the mythical
Age of the Gods, in a manner reminiscent of Tsurayuki’s Kana Preface. At the
same time, Zeami establishes his own family as hereditary protectors and
transmitters of his art, just as the Rokujō and Mikohidari families did for
waka. The key vehicle is the master/disciple relationship, derived from the
scholarly tradition of Confucianism. As in karon, standardized styles are held
up as models of the art, to be practiced in a prescribed order. Nōgakuron
differ from karon, however, in their deep reliance on the Buddhist paradigm
of religious training, which brings mental and spiritual aspects to the fore. In
noh, the artist evolves to transcend the internalized models, to realize a
universal, higher truth of unfettered creativity and artistic freedom, analo-
gous to the attainment of the non-duality extolled in Mahayana Buddhism.
Furthermore, the psychology of the audience is keenly analyzed, in marked
contrast to waka treatises, which initially define only objective styles, and
then later the correct pedagogical sequence. Zeami constantly strives to
adjust his art to a level of refinement suitable for his audience. This is
evidence of a typically medieval concern with the process of reception,
with affective theory, due to the inherently social nature of the era’s domi-
nant literary arts. In renga, a participant must act almost simultaneously as
poet and creative reader, and noh, as a performing art, provides the actor
with immediate evidence of audience response.

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 36
Kyōgen: comic plays that turn medieval
society upside down
laurence kominz

Early kyōgen
A gambler, impersonating a Buddhist statue, tricks gullible worshipers into
giving him alms (Niō); a lowly seaweed peddler disarms a samurai and forces
him at sword-point to sell seaweed on the streets (Kobu Uri); the powerful
thunder god wiggles in pain, under the ministrations of a quack acupuncture
doctor (Kaminari). This is the world of kyōgen drama, which turns late
medieval Japanese society and religion upside down, often stretching the
consequences to absurd extremes.
Kyōgen is Japan’s classical comic theater, and also Japan’s oldest dialogue-
based drama. The earliest precursors to kyōgen plays are thought to be
irreverent skits performed along with court dances (gigaku and bugaku) in
the Nara and Heian periods. One such skit featured a nun who breaks her
vow of celibacy and secretly goes to the market to buy diapers. Heian and
Kamakura era sangaku (“miscellaneous”) performances included physical
humor, acrobatics, and dance. Amateur and semi-professional storytellers
flourished in the same time period. All of these performers contributed to a
comic heritage that would come to be called kyōgen (“crazy words”).
From the early 1400s Zeami (1363–1443) and other leaders of noh troupes
brought kyōgen performers under their organizational umbrella, and kyōgen
plays have been performed as comic interludes between noh plays from that
time until today. The tasks of kyōgen actors in the noh troupes have been the
same since Zeami’s time: (1) to perform the lively and earthy ritual dance
“Sambaso” (black-faced old man) as part of the Okina (old man-god) play; (2)
to act or recite the interludes (ai) in the middle of noh plays, explaining the
situation in non-poetic speech and giving the main noh actor (shite) time to
change costume; (3) to present independent, comic kyōgen plays between

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noh plays. It is these independent plays, or hon-kyōgen (“true kyōgen”), that

are the focus of this chapter.
Kyōgen texts were not written down until the Edo period. No individuals
took credit for or were recognized for devising the stories for kyōgen plays.
Troupe leaders and the performers were responsible for performing plays on
an impromptu basis. They probably kept records of play names, character
lists, and rough outlines of play plots. On-stage movements were typical,
repeatable gestures – called kata – similar to lazzi in commedia dell’arte,
flexible tools for improvisation. Dialogue, not song, predominates, and actors
spoke on-stage in recognizable vernacular language, improvising as neces-
sary, adapting plots and characters to each performance venue and audience.
Few records from the 1400s and early 1500s even cite the names of kyōgen
plays. Interestingly, the only diarist to mention their content is the nobleman
Prince Sadafusa of Fushimi, who in 1424 listed three unusual cases in which
kyōgen performers’ mockery of their patrons was so pointed that the angry
patrons drove away the actors. In one case the performers presented a play
about impoverished noblemen at a performance sponsored by noblemen,
and in another case Enryakuji monks were angered by a play about monkeys
(the monkey being a sacred messenger of their temple on Mount Hiei).

The development of the plays

The oldest surviving list of kyōgen plays is the Tenshō kyōgen bon (1578), a
guidebook for actors that contains summaries, not scripts, for 103 plays. The
plot summaries are about one paragraph long, with enough detailed informa-
tion for experienced improvisational performers to flesh out the action. The
only literary texts included in these entries are short songs, poems, and
riddles that are embedded in some of the plays. Eighty-three of the titles in
the Tenshō kyōgen bon are still performed today. These summaries give us our
only real glimpse of pre-Edo period kyōgen, and allow us to see how plays
developed between the 1570s and the mid 1600s when kyōgen troupes were
founded and the troupes’ official play scripts were written down.
The earliest book of play texts is the Ōkura Toraakira bon (1642), written by
the head (iemoto) of the Ōkura school for his actors to use. Much had taken
place to change the art since the Tenshō kyōgen bon was written in 1578. The
Tokugawa bakufu, which created a sociopolitical system that sought to
maintain peace and order in every aspect of life, decreed that the ceremonial
arts (shikigaku) of the ruling elite would be noh and kyōgen. The rulers
disenfranchised all but five schools of noh, and required leading kyōgen

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actors to be members of three schools: Ōkura, Izumi, and Sagi. All actors
outside of these troupes were banned from kyōgen. The heads of the kyōgen
schools were required to write down their plays, and record instructions for
members of their troupes. Kyōgen plays, once the delight of farmers and
noblemen alike, were now to be presented almost exclusively to elite samurai
audiences. Not surprisingly, when we read the play texts written down in the
1640s–60s we see considerable change from the 1578 versions. However, the
central motif of most plays, the temporary overturning of the social order
through low-ranking characters who defeat high-ranking characters, was
maintained.
What were the sources of inspiration for the unknown medieval performers
who enacted the comic plots in the Tenshō kyōgen bon? Comparing the plays’
stories with other surviving texts shows affinities with setsuwa (folk tales,
anecdotes) collected in secular and religious anthologies. But no kyōgen play
resembles a stage version of a known prose story. Kyōgen performers were
aware that humorous stories need to be changed to succeed on the stage.
The most popular play in the current repertory, Busu (Delicious Poison), is
one of the few for which we can identify an original literary source: in the
Shasekishū (Tales of Sand and Pebbles, 1279–83), a medieval collection of
religious and secular tales. In the original story a Buddhist priest acquires a
jar of valuable brown sugar – imported from foreign islands to the south. He
has to leave the temple on business and tells his young acolyte that the sugar
is a poison called “busu” (made by boiling torikabuto root) and that to remain
safe the acolyte must not touch it. But the acolyte discovers his master’s lie
and eats up the sugar. In the Tenshō kyōgen bon version a second acolyte is
added to the story, presumably to facilitate interaction on stage and drama-
tize the decision to eat the “poison” and then cover up the misdeed. The
acolytes destroy two of the priest’s treasures and later tell him that they ate
the poison to kill themselves in atonement for their crimes. The relationship
between the two acolytes seems to have been free for improvisational
development by the actors. In the Toraakira bon the setting has changed to
a secular household, and the two servants are the ubiquitous Tarō Kaja and
Jirō Kaja who are involved in an amusing sub-plot in which Tarō tricks and
teases Jirō. The two servants play the roles of what would become in the
modern period a standard comic duo, tsukkomi and boke (“smart guy” and
“dumb guy”) in contemporary manzai.
Standardization of kyōgen in the early Edo period also required the
creation of a classification system for kyōgen plays, which largely follows
noh in the use of main characters to create a typology: (1) celebratory god

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plays (waki); (2) landlord plays (daimyō); (3) small landlord (shomyō) and
servant plays; (4) husband/woman plays (muko/onna); (5) demon/mountain
wizard plays (oni/yamabushi); (6) priest/blind man plays (shukke/zatō); and (7)
miscellaneous plays (atsume) – many about thieves and shysters. Today the
repertory of the Ōkura school includes about two hundred plays and the
Izumi school 260. The Sagi school was disbanded in the late Edo period.

Kyōgen and noh

As in the noh drama, kyōgen developed many conventions of staging. Most
kyōgen plays begin with stock self-introductions by the first character on
stage, such as, “I am a person who lives in this area” (Kono atari ni sumai itasu
mono de gozaru). These words create an intimacy between character and
audience, in contrast to the distant gods, warrior ghosts, or court ladies the
audience encountered in the immediately preceding noh play. The self-
introduction is followed either by a summons to another character, or by
traveling to meet another character. The traveler delivers a monologue
throughout the travel sequence (michiyuki), explaining his situation, where
he is going and why, and sometimes describing the landmarks he passes. The
main body of the play features the development and resolution of a conflict.
Most plays end with a chase: the victorious, usually lower-class characters are
chased off by the defeated higher-class characters. Some plays end with
formal felicitous laughter, with a sneeze, or other signifiers of felicitation,
victory, or defeat.
Kyōgen functions in an intimate, yet oppositional relationship to noh. The
carriage of the body, the slide-step walk, and musical modes are very similar.
But the intentions and moods of noh and kyōgen plays are entirely different.
Noh plays present famous individuals from history or literature as main
characters. Kyōgen plays, by contrast, are populated by stock figures from
contemporary commoner life. Noh drama presents the power, danger, or
efficacy of gods (kami), Buddhas, ghosts, demons, and other supernatural
beings, and usually requires the intercession of a priest, played by the waki,
to help the audience understand and relate to the numinous. In kyōgen plays
by contrast, commoners converse directly with deities and haggle with
demons. Priests in kyōgen are not reverent figures, but the butt of mockery.
Even the Buddhas and gods are playful – when a supplicant begs the god Ebisu
to give him a wife, the deity tells him to go fishing for one in the ocean
(Tsuribari)! In noh plays the suffering ghosts of famous men and women turn to
the Buddha for salvation; in kyōgen unnamed commoners rely on their own

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wits to solve very prosaic problems such as how to get out of a troublesome
chore, how to avoid paying a debt, how to drink alcohol for free, how to
acquire money quickly and easily, and how to get your husband to help out
around the house.

Parody and satire

The kyōgen repertory stands as medieval Japan’s secular and playful counter-
part to the harsh, formal social values intended to govern the lives of
Japanese. Although some characters harbor murderous intent, human beings
are never killed in kyōgen plays, nor is there any suicide. Everyday life, not
spiritual rebirth, is of the utmost concern to kyōgen characters. Kyōgen plays
ridicule the elite and elevate the low. Conflicts between unequal rivals end
with victory for the social inferior. This leveling extends up to the realm of
the gods and down to animals. Gods have human frailties (Kaminari); noble
sentiments are attributed to animals (Tsurigitsune).
The core of much kyōgen humor is in parody, which deconstructs and
inverts specific texts or social types and norms. Some kyōgen plays have
satiric intent and provide social critiques. Elite or exalted figures (secular and
religious) are turned into comic characters. In Futari daimyō (Two Feudal
Lords), for example, two foolish samurai try to force a lowly courier to serve
them, but the commoner quickly disarms them, and at sword-point forces
the incompetent warriors to perform humiliating children’s songs and
dances. He steals their clothes and weapons, and runs off.
Kyōgen’s thunder god (Kaminari) is a hypochondriac who howls in pain
when given acupuncture treatment. Everyone in the audience, in the med-
ieval period and today, has experienced unpleasant medical treatment. We
can all feel the victim’s pain, so the thunder god becomes “one of us.” And yet
he remains the powerful thunder god, able to control the weather, and at the
end of the play he guarantees eight hundred years of seasonable rains as his
payment to the doctor.
Most kyōgen engages in character travesty, denigrating what is high, to comic
effect. At the same time, however, socially low characters are elevated, which is
a kind of burlesque. The eponymous burlesque hero of kyōgen, appearing in
almost half of the plays, is the servant Tarō Kaja, a resourceful man of many
appetites. Kyōgen’s one-two punch of character travesty and burlesque creates a
liminal, egalitarian world that existed in medieval Japan only on the kyōgen
stage and in some festivals that mandated alternative social hierarchies.

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Some kyōgen plays (called noh-gakari plays) are textual parodies of lofty noh
plays. These plays copy the conventions of noh’s spirit plays but replace the
exalted noh character with a lowly one. For example, the ghost of a warrior
cruelly slain in battle becomes, in kyōgen, the suffering ghost of an octopus,
caught by a fisherman, and cruelly chopped up on a kitchen cutting board,
cooked, and eaten (Tako). His suffering is just as agonizing as the samurai’s.
The noh-style choral singing and stylized dancing are diminished somewhat for
the kyōgen play, but the formal dignity and gravity of the language and
presentational mode contrast with the shite’s lowly status as a mollusk.
There are several kyōgen plays that pointedly satirize powerful elites. In
Konomi Arasoi (The Battle of the Fruits and Nuts) a petty quarrel between a
chestnut and a tangerine over cherry-blossom-viewing privileges spur the nut
and the fruit to lead their clans to war against each other. A parody of a
samurai battle ensues, but before either emerges victorious a strong wind
blows both armies away. The play satirizes the samurai elite, depicting
samurai honor as no more than petty pride and pique, and the samurai
penchant for violent solutions as needless and self-destructive. The master-
piece Utsubozaru (Monkey Quiver) brings a feudal lord, a monkey trainer (a
social outcast), and a monkey into intimate contact with each other. The lord
initially intends to kill the monkey and use its pelt to decorate his quiver, but
the lord is so moved by the trainer’s grief, and so amused by the monkey’s
antics, that he capers about imitating the monkey, and he gives all his
possessions to the trainer. The haughty samurai lord discovers humanity in
an animal and an outcaste, and so discovers a hidden humanity in himself.
This play strongly intimates that samurai would be better rulers if they were
as compassionate and egalitarian as the feudal lord at the end of the drama.
Shūron (A Religious Dispute) features self-righteous priests from the rival
Pure Land and Lotus Sutra sects of Buddhism. Their arrogant bull-head-
edness takes the form of a chant competition. In the course of their shouting
they unwittingly begin chanting sutras of the opposing sect – revealing the
hollowness of their beliefs and the stupidity of sectarian strife.
Why didn’t such parody and satire offend the elite patrons of kyōgen? Why
didn’t they punish actors or ban the art? The answer lies on the fine line
between entertainment and social/political rebellion. While mass furyū dances
(in the late medieval period) often blurred the distinction, turned into uprisings,
and were therefore subject to numerous bans by local authorities, kyōgen
remained a comic art confined to the stage. Kyōgen was born in an age of
turmoil, of gekokujō, when the lowborn often overthrew their masters, but the
social topsy-turvy in kyōgen plays proved equally enjoyable to the Edo period

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ruling elite in times of peace and stability. The stupidity and cowardice of
kyōgen’s samurai and priests, the gullibility of worshipers, the greedy conniv-
ing of the wealthy are so highly exaggerated that medieval, Edo period, and
modern viewers see these onstage characters as significantly weaker and sillier
than themselves.

Creating kyōgen humor

At the base of all humor is the perception of incongruity. Almost every
kyōgen play is marked by the personification of natural or non-human
phenomena, and onomatopoeia is one of the treasures of kyōgen. Actors
use their human voices to represent any number of animal cries (crows:
kokaa-kokaa; monkeys: kyaa-kyaa; falcons: pee . . . yoro-yoro-yoro) as well as
heavy doors sliding (gara-gara-gara), sawing through wood (zuka-zuka-zuka),
temple bells ringing and reverberating (jan! . . . an-an-an-an). Even more
incongruous is the representation of natural phenomena using the body of
the human actor. To represent mushrooms proliferating in a garden, actors
of different sizes, from children to adults, wearing large conical hats, silently
walk onto the stage and fill it with huge mushrooms. Thunder becomes a
god, played by an actor. He flashes lightning by leaping, arms and legs
akimbo, and shouting, “pikkari!” (“flash!”); and he rumbles by stamping his
feet and shouting “garari, garari, garari!” (“rumble, rumble, rumble!”).
A frequently used comic device in kyōgen establishes a repeated pattern,
and then suddenly rupture the pattern. During the opening self-introduction
and travel sequence in Kaki yamabushi (Persimmons) a mountain wizard
boasts in a loud voice about his toughness and rigorous training – including
sleeping in the wild. He claims great magical powers. Then suddenly, in a
meek voice, he admits that he spent last night at an inn, and soon after, when
put to an easy test, his magical powers prove non-existent. The audience
laughs when the pattern of braggadocio and power is ruptured by the reality
of lies, weakness, and incompetence. Many kyōgen plays delight viewers
with hyperbolic leaps from the credible to the absurd. In Hige yagura (The
Fortified Beard) a husband and wife argue about his long, black beard. It is his
pride and joy. She wants it off – it’s smelly and gets in his food. He beats her
and laughs; she leaves, vowing payback. His friend helps him protect his
beard using a miniature castle tower hanging from his shoulders, complete
with flags and a gate. She returns with her lady friends all dressed like
samurai, ready for battle. For weapons they carry over-sized scissors, twee-
zers, clippers, and other barbers’ implements. In a sung and danced parody of

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a noh-style military combat they break through the castle gate and clip and
pull out the husband’s beard.

Kyōgen after World War II

Kyōgen maintained its traditional repertory and functions through World
War II. After the war kyōgen actors strove to create new audiences by
performing for low pay at schools in the Tokyo and Kansai regions. Partly
due to this, a population of kyōgen devotees arose that was not interested in
watching slow-paced, hard-to-understand noh plays. Since the 1950s many all-
kyōgen shows have been presented. Kyōgen actors began to experiment in
the 1950s with resurrecting long-unperformed plays, adapting foreign plays to
kyōgen-style presentation, and creating entirely new kyōgen plays. While
these are a small percentage of plays in performance, several new works are
produced every year. A few adaptations have been so successful that they
have been performed repeatedly, such as the Shigeyama’s (Ōkura school)
adaptation of the French farce Le Cuvier (The Washing Bucket, J. Susugigawa)
and Nomura Mansai’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors
(Machigai no kyōgen).

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Late medieval popular fiction
and narrated genres: otogizōshi,
kōwakamai, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri
r.keller kimbrough

The late medieval period was characterized by a remarkable florescence of the

literary, visual, and performing arts. In addition to the famous “high” culture of
renga linked poetry, the Kanō and Tosa schools of painting, and the masked
noh drama, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the rise of a vast new
genre of anonymous short fiction (otogizōshi), nameless workshops produ-
cing colorful and relatively affordable bound books (nara ehon), and a wide
variety of itinerant and temple-based performers and preacher-entertainers,
including miko shrine maidens, etoki picture narrators, shōmonji street
preachers, blind minstrel priests (zatō and biwa hōshi), temple fundraisers
(kanjin hijiri), wandering holy men, kōwakamai ballad-dancers, and sekkyō
sermon-balladeers. The cities bustled with merchants, monks, and samurai,
and the highways and bridges pulsed with commerce and travelers of
every sort.
The popular fiction and narrated genres of the time differed in many ways
from what had come before. The golden age of setsuwa tales had petered out
in the fourteenth century, replaced by longer, more developed stories such as
those in the early fifteenth-century Sangoku denki (Tales of Three Countries),
a work seemingly transitional between early medieval setsuwa and late
medieval fiction. Otogizōshi – an anachronistic, catch-all designation for
the many types of medieval short creative prose – were consumed by men
and women of all ages and social classes. They were sometimes composed
from preexisting setsuwa and noh plays, sometimes from scratch, and some-
times from transcriptions of contemporary oral performances by a variety of
street-level preachers and raconteurs. Their authors are almost entirely
unknown, but are believed to have included monks, courtiers, and renga
masters, as well as some professional storytellers and lay preacher-
entertainers.

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Both kōwakamai and sekkyō (also sekkyō-bushi), two independent

oral/performative genres with roots in early medieval preaching and story-
telling, came to possess a recognizable repertoire of tales in the late medieval
period. But in their transcribed and illustrated forms, most of which date
from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these stories are also
sometimes categorized as otogizōshi, and are thus occasionally included in
major modern compendiums of all three narrative genres. There is likewise
an overlap among sekkyō, kōwakamai, otogizōshi, and the seventeenth-
century ko-jōruri (“old jōruri”) puppet theater, the early plays of which tended
to be based on earlier kōwakamai, sekkyō, and other katari-mono (oral
narrative) compositions. Jōruri eventually broke free of its medieval roots
with the advent of Kinpira jōruri in the 1650s, but until that time it shared a
fundamental affinity with sekkyō, kōwakamai, and other late medieval
literary and performance genres. By around the late seventeenth century,
kōwakamai was waning in the shadow of noh; likewise, sekkyō came to be
increasingly influenced by jōruri until it finally disappeared in the early
eighteenth century as an independent theatrical form. Although the present
chapter is divided into three main parts – the first on mostly Muromachi
period otogizōshi, the second on late Muromachi and early Edo period
kōwakamai, and the third on largely Edo period sekkyō and ko-jōruri –
these subjects overlap in fundamental ways, sharing an enduring medieval
sensibility that transcends periodic divides.

Otogizōshi
Sometime between 1716 and 1729, the Osaka bookseller Shibukawa Seiemon
published a box-set anthology of mostly short Muromachi period fiction
titled Otogi bunko (The Companion Library), from which the term “otogi-
zōshi” (companion books) was born. Alternately titled Shūgen otogi bunko
(The Felicitous Companion Library), likely indicating its suitability as a
wedding gift, Shibukawa’s woodblock-printed compendium contained
twenty-three works of popular prose fiction with simple uncolored illustra-
tions, including tales of merchants, maidens, martial heroes, anthropo-
morphic animals, Heian period poets, slandered stepchildren, a notorious
demon, and an impecunious fishmonger. Shibukawa also included a single
kōwakamai composition (Hamaide, or Hamaide sōshi), leading to that work’s
unusual categorization by contemporary scholars as both a kōwakamai and
an otogizōshi.

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Rather than carving new blocks to produce the volumes in his anthology,
Shibukawa seems to have recycled a set from around 1655–70, which an
unknown Kyoto publisher had used in the seventeenth century to publish
those same works in tanrokubon “red and green books” with simply and
colorfully hand-daubed illustrations. In a 1769 Catalog of Beneficial Books for
Women, Shibukawa’s publishing house, the Kashiwara-ya, advertised The
Companion Library as “containing all of the interesting stories of the past,”
and in a separate book list from c. 1764–72 the Kashiwara-ya advertised it as a
“useful guide to women’s self-improvement.” Regardless of the actual suit-
ability of his anthology for women, Shibukawa’s name stuck, and within a
hundred years the related term otogizōshi had come to designate the wider
corpus of short medieval fiction. In 1801 Ozaki Masayoshi used the word to
refer specifically to the tales in Shibukawa’s collection, but in 1830 and 1847
Kitamura Nobuyo and Santō Kyōzan used it to refer to Muromachi tales in
general.
Some four hundred different otogizōshi are known to exist today. (Efforts
to count them have been complicated by an abundance of variant texts that
may or may not constitute individual, disparate works.) In the last seventy or
eighty years, scholars have called them Muromachi jidai monogatari
(Muromachi period tales), Muromachi monogatari (Muromachi tales), kinko
shōsetsu (Kamakura and Muromachi period novels), and chūsei shōsetsu (med-
ieval novels), but the current consensus favors the term otogizōshi, written as
御伽草子 to refer to the twenty-three works in Shibukawa’s anthology, and
as お伽草子 to refer to the medieval genre in general. Ichiko Teiji famously
divided extant otogizōshi into six major categories based on the identities of
the stories’ principal characters: courtier tales, religious tales, warrior tales,
commoner tales, tales of other countries, and animal tales.1 His system is
useful insofar as it imposes a kind of rough order on the vast and diverse
corpus of short medieval fiction, but it tends toward oversimplification; as
Virginia Skord has observed, it “has the unfortunate effect of obscuring
features held in common by disparate stories and of unduly emphasizing
superficial resemblances between tales classified together” (Skord, 11). But
Ichiko’s system – with its numerous sub-categories – continues to be the most
widely employed.
It is a contemporary truism that commoner tales constitute the heart of
otogizōshi, and, indeed, many of those stories remain the best-known works
in the genre today. For Okami Masao in 1951, “commoner culture” embodied

1
Ichiko Teiji, Chūsei shōsetsu no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1955).

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the spirit of the Muromachi age, and for Ichiko Teiji, likewise writing in the
immediate postwar period, it was “the people” – that is, the non-aristocratic,
extramonastic, and non-militaristic people – who inspired and sustained the
genre.2 Ichiko divided his corpus of commoner tales into four thematic sub-
categories: humorous tales, stories of love and courtship, tales of worldly
advancement, and felicitous tales. As examples, Fukutomi sōshi (The King of
Farts) tells of a poor city dweller who seeks to emulate the success of his
wealthy neighbour – a professional fart-entertainer – with disastrously diar-
rheal results; Monokusa Tarō (Lazy Tarō), Issun bōshi (Little One-Inch), and Ko-
otoko no sōshi (The Little Man) tell of extraordinarily lazy or diminutive men
who succeed in marrying women beyond their social and physical stature;
Bunshō sōshi (Bunshō the Saltmaker), Umezu Chōja monogatari (The
Millionaire of Umezu), and Daikokumai (The Dance of Daikoku) tell of
lowly men who achieve stunning worldly success; and Nanakusa sōshi (The
Seven Herbs) and Tsuru kame matsu take monogatari (The Tale of the Crane,
Turtle, Pine, and Bamboo) recount the origins of auspicious things.
Although Ichiko did not see fit to grant them their own category, super-
natural tales are among the most interesting and famous of all otogizōshi.
Encounters with demons and ghosts, tours of hell and the afterworld, and
battles with giant snakes, spiders, and centipedes were all fodder for medieval
authors and artists, the latter of whom sometimes illustrated their stories in
sumptuous emaki picture scrolls intended for wealthy townsmen, the nobi-
lity, and regional lords. For example, Tengu no dairi (The Palace of the
Tengu), which dates from around the early sixteenth century and concerns
the legendary life of the Genpei War hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune, survives
in multiple exquisite handscrolls in museums and library collections around
the world. Ichiko classifies it as a warrior tale, but it is a supernatural story of
the thirteen-year-old Yoshitsune’s visit to the palace of the tengu, a mythical
species of demon-bird-men known for their magical powers and mischievous
inclinations. As the tale is told, Yoshitsune prays to the statue of Bishamonten
at Kurama Temple for directions to the tengu’s palace, where he meets the
so-called Great Tengu and his wife. The wife informs him that his late father,
Yoshitomo, has been reborn as Dainichi Buddha in the Pure Land of Amida
Buddha. The Great Tengu agrees to take Yoshitsune there for a visit, but he
insists on first showing him the six planes of karmic transmigration, including
the three evil realms of hell, hungry ghosts, and ashura (a place of constant,

2
Okami first articulated his notion of the “Muromachi-gokoro,” or “spirit of Muromachi,”
in an article of that title in Kokugo kokubun 20, no. 8 (November 1951).

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never ending violence). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists painted

frightening depictions of Yoshitsune’s harrowing journey, creating emaki
assemblages of text and illustration that are neither exclusively literature
nor art, but, like many of the finer illustrated otogizōshi manuscripts (both
emaki and nara ehon), can only be appreciated as combinations of the two.
Tengu no dairi shares major plot elements with the kōwakamai Miraiki, and,
on the basis of the language of its three oldest texts, scholars agree that it
circulated orally before it was transcribed.
Shuten Dōji (The Demon Shuten Dōji), which Ichiko classifies as a “monster-
ridding tale” (a sub-category of warrior tales), survives in an especially large
number of emaki, nara ehon, and woodblock-printed editions, demonstrat-
ing its broad popularity in the late medieval and early modern eras. The work
is best known today for its inclusion in Shibukawa’s Companion Library, but it
actually dates from at least the late fourteenth century, when it was depicted
in an anonymous emaki titled Ōeyama ekotoba (Mount Ōe in Pictures and
Words). Shuten Dōji tells of how a Heian period emperor sent Minamoto no
Raikō and his small band of warriors on a mission to slay the notorious
demon Shuten Dōji, who had made a nuisance of himself by abducting and
devouring young women from the capital. Disguised as yamabushi mountain
ascetics, Raikō and his men seek an audience with the demon in his mountain-
fortress home. Shuten Dōji invites them inside, where he tests them by
offering “drinks” (a carafe of freshly squeezed human blood) and a “side
dish” (a severed woman’s leg). The men join Shuten Dōji at his grim repast,
after which they poison him with magical saké and cut off his head. Most
Shuten Dōji manuscripts contain a ghastly painted scene of Shuten Dōji and
the men drinking a young woman’s blood from a large shallow bowl and
savoring slices of flesh from her raw, bloody leg, which is invariably laid out
on a large cutting board like a fish or a shank of meat. Ironically, insofar as
the men are obliged to cannibalize one of the women they had come to
save, their participation in the meal causes them to be complicit in the
crime they had come to avert.
Intertextuality is a characteristic of many otogizōshi, and Shuten Dōji is
remarkable for the large number of related tales that it inspired, particularly
concerning the demon in his youth. As one example, the otogizōshi Ibuki Dōji
explores the reasons for Shuten Dōji’s transformation from a human child
into the saké-drinking, flesh-eating demon that he was to become. A Shuten
Dōji prequel with plot elements drawn from the otogizōshi Benkei monogatari
(The Tale of Benkei), Ibuki Dōji traces Shuten Dōji’s predilections to his
father, Ibuki no Yasaburō, who is said to have possessed an insatiable appetite

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for meat and drink. An Ibuki Dōji emaki in the possession of the British
Museum explains:
Yasaburō was a man of clean good looks and a strong, sturdy build, but he
loved saké from his youth and drank a great deal. The older he grew, the
more he drank, until he came to be perpetually drunk. His mind raving, he
would spew the most unreasonable abuse and perpetrate the most horrible
deeds. “Ah, if only I could drink my fill!” he would cry to his retainers. A
provincial highway lay nearby, so he took to plundering the stocks of passing
merchants and guzzling those.

An alternate Ibuki Dōji emaki in the possession of Tōyō University Library

likewise reports that Yasaburō “loved saké and drank a great deal of it.” The
narrator observes that
Yasaburō hunted animals in the mountains and fields and feasted on them
constantly. On days when he could acquire no game, he would seize the
peasants’ beloved horses, oxen, sheep, pigs, dogs, and chickens. Slaughtering
and devouring firewood-bearing horses and plow-oxen, he was like a demon
to behold. When word spread that he would soon be eating people, too, the
locals abandoned their homes and fled in the four directions, until the area
around Ibuki Village was reduced to uninhabited fields.

Yasaburō’s son Shuten Dōji, whose name means “saké-drinking boy,”

immediately takes after his father. The British Museum text explains that,
as a child, “Shuten Dōji was constantly drunk and deranged. His spirit was
ferocious. He would abuse innocent people, and dashing through the moun-
tains and fields, he would thrash the horses and oxen that he found there.”
Shuten Dōji takes to eating all manner of birds and beasts, which are
painstakingly depicted in a series of colorful illustrations in the British
Museum scrolls. Before his father Yasaburō’s death, Yasaburō’s diet had
been implicitly equated with evil ascetic Buddhist practices, the performance
of which would endow him with strange, supernatural powers. In Shuten
Dōji’s case the potential effects of a meaty, alcoholic diet are fully realized,
and as the picture scrolls unroll, he gradually transforms before the reader’s
eyes from a small human boy into a brawny, terrible monster.
As we can see in this and other Shuten Dōji stories, otogizōshi often allude
to other otogizōshi; their authors also sometimes pass judgments on the
characters and events in other works, lending them a critical, commentarial
tone and providing avenues for reader-response-type analyses. The otogi-
zōshi Isozaki, which seems to date from around the late sixteenth century,
contains an interesting example. Although Isozaki is the story of a woman

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who murders her husband’s second wife in a fit of rage, it contains a setsuwa-

like summary of a famous tale in the otogizōshi Dōjōji engi (A History of
Dōjōji Temple; fourteenth or fifteenth century) and other Heian and medie-
val sources, including setsuwa and noh. A supernatural snake story classified
by Ichiko as a “religious tale,” Dōjōji engi tells of a handsome young monk
who takes lodging at a single woman’s house on his way to Kumano Shrine.
The woman becomes infatuated with her guest, and crawling into bed with
him in the dark, she nudges him awake. The monk refuses her advances,
protesting that he must maintain ritual purity until after his visit to the shrine,
but he falsely promises to visit her on his return. When he fails to come back,
the enraged woman transforms into a giant serpent, pursues him to Dōjōji
Temple, and incinerates him inside a large temple bell. Dōjōji engi and other
sources castigate the woman for her wickedness – the narrator of a Dōjōji engi
emaki in the possession of Dōjōji Temple explains that “all women, high and
low, are plagued by a jealous heart”– but the Isozaki narrator, who advocates
Zen meditational practices and identifies the monk as a yamabushi mountain
ascetic, expresses a different opinion:

Both the yamabushi and the woman fell into hell because of the woman’s
single-hearted desire. But people also say that it was because of the yama-
bushi’s stupidity. Nothing like this would have happened if she had been
allowed to achieve her small aspiration. It would have been like drinking
water when you are thirsty. The Buddha too was once a layman. Water may
be muddied, but it will become pure again.

Writing against a host of earlier authors, the Isozaki narrator argues that the
murdered monk himself was to blame for selfishly refusing the woman’s
lecherous request.
Otogizōshi are not known for their subtlety, but they are often entertain-
ing. In many ways they constitute a literature of extremes. Their characters
tend toward various kinds of socially proscribed behavior, whether killing
themselves, murdering their rivals, abandoning their babies, burning tem-
ples, seducing monastics, slandering their stepchildren, or sleeping with their
own siblings, parents, and children. But they are also capable of virtuous
extremes, including extraordinary self-sacrifice, filial piety, and exceptional
religious devotion. Characters are frequently made to embody their own
intangible failings, transforming into ruddy demons and giant snakes, for
example, as a result of their excessive drinking and their jealous rage. In such
stories, internal psychological conditions and spiritual abstractions are man-
ifested as external, concrete phenomena. In Isozaki, for example, the female

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protagonist dons a demon mask before bludgeoning her husband’s second

wife to death; then, after the murder, she finds that she can no longer remove
her disguise. Her physical transformation is vividly illustrated in several
extant Isozaki emaki and nara ehon, suggesting a psychic change that has
taken place within her as a result of her crime: she has become a demon,
literally as well as figuratively. People are constantly and subtly changed by
the things that they do, a point that is fantastically and flamboyantly made in
Isozaki, Ibuki Dōji, Dōjōji engi, and other otogizōshi. As a generic category,
otogizōshi are notoriously difficult to define, but they often function simi-
larly, in some cases demonstrating depths of empathy and understanding that
other, more “realistic” works of literature do not.

Kōwakamai
Unlike otogizōshi, which constitutes a purely textual genre, kōwakamai (also
kōwaka bukyoku) refers to both a late medieval performance tradition and the
tales in its repertoire. Kōwakamai, or “ballad-drama,” to borrow James
Araki’s term, evolved out of kusemai, a popular style of singing and dancing
performed in the early fifteenth century by shōmonji street preachers and
other male and female entertainers. It seems to have emerged as a distinct
performance genre in the latter half of that century when its oral narratives
shifted from accounts of the origins of gods and buddhas to principally
martial tales derived from earlier textual and oral traditions. The name
kōwakamai, which literally means “Kōwaka dance,” is derived from the
name of the Kōwaka family of practitioners, one of two late medieval schools
of the genre (the other being the Daigashira). The Kōwaka school traces its
lineage to the fifteenth-century Momonoi Naoaki (or Naoakira, aka
Kōwakamaru), who it says invented kōwakamai when he was an acolyte
on Mount Hiei. However, the story of Naoaki’s single-handed creation of the
art is likely apocryphal, and the genre’s origins remain obscure.
Likewise, almost nothing is known about how kōwakamai was enacted in
the period of its greatest popularity, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, and to what degrees dialogue, mimicry, and dance were employed
are all unclear. James Araki writes that while kōwakamai and noh “seem to
have been equally prized by the samurai of the late sixteenth century,”
whether or not kōwakamai can be classified “as a form of staged drama,”
like noh, is difficult to say (Araki, 1981, 7–8). Moreover, insofar as none of the
kōwakamai texts that survive today are written with musical or stage nota-
tion, they provide little insight into how they may have been actually

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performed. In the years before his death in 1747, Dazai Shundai wrote about
kōwakamai, explaining,
As for the kōwaka dancing of recent times, people say that it was started
around the end of the Muromachi period by a certain Kōwakamaru – a
descendent of Lord Momonoi [Naotsune] – when he was a child on Mount
Hiei. In some parts it resembles the recitations of biwa hōshi (minstrel
priests), and in some parts it resembles the chanting of sarugaku (noh). But
in either case, no one employs a singing voice, and despite its being called
“dancing” (mai), no one gets up and dances. The performers simply keep
time by slapping their hands with a fan. There are a set number of ballads, all
of which tell stories from the past. Nothing new is composed, and if a
gentleman joins in with the masters, there is no danger that he will be
urged to sing. Up until around the Kanbun and Enpō eras (1661–81), lords
and nobles would drink and enjoy these performances at their banquets, but
since around the Genroku period (1688–1704), sarugaku has flourished and
everyone has abandoned kōwaka dancing.
Shundai’s observations are revealing, but their relevance to the kōwakamai
of 150 or 200 years before is unclear.
With only roughly fifty extant works, the kōwakamai repertoire is rela-
tively modest compared to that of otogizōshi (which, as we have seen,
contains over 400). Its content is also less diverse. Whereas otogizōshi may
concern any real or imagined aspect of this and other worlds, kōwakamai
tend to speak of the samurai class and its struggles in the years surrounding
the Genpei War (1180–5). The narratives are serious in tone, always dramatic,
and in most cases lack the fantastic imagination and comic sensibility of many
otogizōshi. As Araki explains,
Forty of the pieces are set in the brief historical period encompassing the
years between 1160 and 1193, and the events described are generally related to
members of the Heike and Genji clans. In addition to the twenty which treat
the life of Yoshitsune, there are seven which concern the famed vendetta of
the Soga brothers and thirteen which touch upon various aspects of the
struggle between the Genji and the Heike. Of the remaining ten kōwaka, one
is set in the mythological era, eight in various periods between the seventh
and sixteenth centuries, and one in China of the third century B.C.
(Araki, 1964, 121)
Many kōwakamai are episodic, with one ballad beginning where another
leaves off, and this is a further feature that distinguishes them from otogizōshi
and other late medieval narratives.

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Authorship of the kōwakamai corpus remains unknown, but the approx-

imate date of its composition does not. The earliest recorded references to
known kōwakamai are contained in diary entries from the years 1475, 1486,
and 1498, which together mention or allude to the works Shida, Fue no maki
(The Tale of the Flute), Manjū, and Yashima. In the 1498 entry, the intendant
of Shōkokuji Rokuon’in Temple states that “two fine performers from Settsu
province came and put on Tada no Manjū and the story of the Satō brothers
from Michinoku province,” referring in the latter case to what was likely the
kōwakamai Yashima (also Yashima no ikusa, “The Battle of Yashima”).
Moreover, considering that the otogizōshi Tōshōji nezumi monogatari
(A Tale of Mice at Tōshōji Temple) was written in 1537 and contains a list
of thirty kōwakamai, half of which are known from other records to have
been performed at around that time, the preponderance of extant ballads is
believed to date from the mid fifteenth through early sixteenth centuries. The
Tale of Mice is additionally significant insofar as its list of kōwakamai is
included in a larger list of temple books that were supposedly chewed up
and destroyed by a mischievous mouse. Thus, despite being fictional (and
despite the oldest extant collection of kōwakamai manuscripts dating to only
1593), the story demonstrates that by as early as 1537 kōwakamai were not
only being performed, they were also being read.
The transformation of kōwakamai from a principally performative to a
principally literary genre was accelerated in the early seventeenth century by
the publication of several movable-type and woodblock-printed editions of
kōwakamai ballads from the Daigashira lineage of texts. Broadly speaking,
the term mai no hon (kōwakamai book) refers to any manuscript or printed
edition of a kōwakamai narrative; more narrowly construed (and Romanized
with a capital “M”), Mai no hon (Books of Dances) refers to an illustrated,
multivolume set of woodblock-printed kōwakamai first published in thirty-
six volumes in 1632. As tanrokubon, these works contain colorfully hand-
daubed line illustrations, and they seem to have been sold both individually
and as sets. Their textual portions were reproduced from an unillustrated
series of some forty movable-type-printed kōwakamai published in the
Keichō period (1596–1615), but unlike the works in that earlier collection,
which were probably intended for a relatively small and well-educated
audience, the 1632 Books of Dances was mass-produced for a broad reading
public. The collection’s immediate success is demonstrated by the fact that in
1635 it was re-released in a second, more “reader-friendly” edition comprised
of the most popular thirteen of the original thirty-six works. Books of Dances

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was republished throughout the seventeenth century in slightly different

forms, and its influence on Edo period literature was profound.
Like otogizōshi, sekkyō, and even some ko-jōruri, kōwakamai were repro-
duced in colorful nara ehon and lavish emaki picture scrolls in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and in those forms they can be difficult to
tell from related works in other genres. In addition, literary and dramatic
variants and/or adaptations of kōwakamai are included in the corpuses of
otogizōshi, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri, further blurring generic boundaries. The
kōwakamai Manjū, for example, which tells of a loyal retainer’s heartbreaking
decision to execute his own son in lieu of his master’s, was also performed as
sekkyō, and Yamanaka Tokiwa (Lady Tokiwa at Yamanaka), which tells of
Yoshitsune’s mother Lady Tokiwa’s brutal murder by a band of thieves, was
performed as ko-jōruri in the earliest years of the theater. Furthermore,
readerly versions of both works survive as otogizōshi.

Sekkyō and Ko-jōruri

The histories of sekkyō and ko-jōruri are intimately linked. Although the
term sekkyō is written with characters meaning “sutra explanation,” it has
little to do with the sutras; instead, it refers to both a pseudo-religious
storytelling genre and its performers. In the Muromachi period, mendicant
sekkyō entertainers told tales of the workings of karma and the miraculous
origins of famous Buddhist icons to small groups of men, women, and
children at bridges, crossroads, and the grounds of temples and shrines.
Early seventeenth-century screen paintings of scenes around the Kyoto
capital show them standing in the shade of tall umbrellas and reciting their
stories to the rhythmic accompaniment of a sasara, a kind of notched bamboo
scraper.
The term ko-jōruri (old jōruri) refers to the seventeenth-century jōruri
puppet theater prior to the 1685 publication of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s
seminal Shusse Kagekiyo (Kagekiyo Victorious). As a fully formed theatrical
genre, including puppets, music, and narration, jōruri is believed to have
emerged in the theaters of the dry Kamo riverbed in Kyoto around the first
years of the seventeenth century, immediately following the introduction of
the three-string shamisen from Okinawa. The name “jōruri” is derived from
the otogizōshi Jōruri jūnidan sōshi (The Tale of Lady Jōruri in Twelve Parts),
presumably one of the first and most popular works performed on the early
seventeenth-century puppet stage. Although the first years of jōruri are
shrouded in haze, by around 1614 full-blown plays were being performed in

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makeshift venues at festivals, shrines, and deserted riverbeds throughout

Japan. The plays Amida no munewari (Amida’s Riven Breast) and Goō-no-
hime (Goō-no-hime, named after its eponymous female protagonist) were
performed in Kyoto, Kanazawa, and Kagoshima in 1614 and 1616. In addition,
a pair of screen paintings of scenes around the Kyoto capital (the Funaki
Rakuchū rakugaizu, painted in or around the Genna era, 1615–24) depict staged
performances of Amida no munewari and Yamanaka Tokiwa at adjoining
theaters at the Fourth Avenue Riverbed. Even retired emperor GoYōzei is
said to have been entertained in the ninth month of 1614 with puppet
performances of Amida no munewari and the noh plays Kamo, Daibutsu kuyō,
and Takasago, although whether or not these latter works can be considered
ko-jōruri (as opposed to some other kind of puppetry) is open to debate.
Sekkyō seems to have changed in the early decades of the seventeenth
century when the sekkyō chanter Ōsaka Yoshichirō adapted puppets to his
performances in the manner of the incipient jōruri theater, which employed a
single chanter to declaim both the narrative and all of the characters’
individual lines. Active around the 1620s and 1630s and believed to have
performed in the grounds of Shitennōji Temple in Osaka, Yoshichirō’s
influence was profound, for all later sekkyō chanters (those of any historical
standing, at least) followed him in embracing puppetry. Sekkyō was quickly
transformed from a streetcorner storytelling art into a modern theatrical
genre performed at dedicated urban venues. It would disappear in the early
eighteenth century, absorbed into the flourishing and evolving jōruri theater,
but for several decades of the mid to late 1600s sekkyō and jōruri competed in
the city centers of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka as rival puppet theaters with their
own plays and distinctive linguistic and narrative conventions.
The early ko-jōruri repertoire was principally derived from existing narra-
tive sources, including otogizōshi, kōwakamai, and noh. But sekkyō had its
own corpus of tales, the most famous of which included Sanshō Dayū,
Karukaya, Oguri, Shintokumaru, and Aigo-no-waka, all of which are named
after a major character. Although the vast majority of extant sekkyō were
transcribed or published in the seventeenth century, the stories themselves
are far older, and neither their original authors nor the circumstances of their
composition are known today. From around 1658, sekkyō came to be pub-
lished in six acts and to incorporate grand battle scenes in the manner of ko-
jōruri. For this reason, scholars generally turn to the earliest extant sekkyō –
for example, Karukaya (1631), Sanshō Dayū (c. 1639), and Shintokumaru (1648) –
to contemplate the essential features of the genre.

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Like kōwakamai, sekkyō stories lack the diversity of otogizōshi and even
ko-jōruri. Most tell of the powers of prayer and the once-human origins of
Buddhist icons, including the Branded Jizō Bodhisattva of Tango Province
(Sanshō Dayū), the Parent and Child Jizō Bodhisattva of Zenkōji Temple in
Shinano Province (Karukaya), and the Shō Hachiman Bodhisattva of
Sunomata Village in Mino Province (Oguri emaki). The stories tend to be
brutal: they tell of the sufferings of small children and young adults who are
variously murdered, branded, tortured, poisoned, sold, cursed, abandoned,
and even fed to animals. Sanshō Dayū, for example, recounts the horrific tale
of two small children who are abducted along with their mother and a female
servant. The servant commits suicide, the mother has the tendons in her
wrists and ankles slashed and cries herself blind, and the children are sold to a
man who beats, brands, and starves them before torturing the sister to death
in punishment for helping her brother to escape. But the story is a moving
one, and when the brother comes back to wreak his final, harrowing revenge,
it is hard not to cheer in spite of the barbarity of the scene.
The sekkyō Karukaya is not nearly so grim, but equally sad. Rooted in the
storytelling traditions of a variety of male and female preacher-entertainers,
including Kōya and Zenkōji hijiri (holy men of Mount Kōya and Zenkōji
Temple), Kumano bikuni (Kumano nuns), and some Shikoku-based racon-
teurs, Karukaya describes how a wealthy warlord named Katōzaemon
Shigeuji once abandoned his pregnant wife and three-year-old daughter to
pursue the Buddhist path. Thirteen years later, his wife and son Ishidōmaru –
a boy whom Shigeuji has never met – come looking for him on Mount Kōya.
The wife dies at an inn at the foot of the mountain; the daughter dies at
home; and Shigeuji, fearful of breaking a vow that he had made to give up all
family ties, turns the pitiful Ishidōmaru away without revealing to him that
he is his father. Similar stories are preserved in otogizōshi, the saddest of
which may be the sixteenth-century Tameyo no sōshi (The Tale of Tameyo)
and its variants, in which the renunciant father’s two orphaned children
choose to drown themselves in a river. Like the fathers they describe, the
narrators of these works are often highly morally conflicted, torn between
sympathy and loathing for the cruelty of their characters. By focusing on the
renunciants’ acute mental anguish, as well as the mortal desperation of the
wives and children whom they leave behind, the authors and reciters of these
didactic Buddhist tales explore the nature of domestic attachment while
questioning the very meaning of monastic renunciation. As a result, their
stories are fundamentally at odds with themselves, simultaneously upholding
and undermining their own philosophical underpinnings.

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Ko-jōruri plays can be equally distressing for the reader. For example, in
Kagekiyo, which along with Jōruri jūnidan sōshi, Amida no munewari, Goō-no-
hime, Kamata, and Yamanaka Tokiwa seems to be one of the earlier works in
the repertoire, the protagonist Kagekiyo murders his own two children to
punish his wife. Having already killed his first son, he sadly explains to his
second that it is the boy’s mother’s fault that he will stab him through the
heart. In Goō-no-hime, the beautiful and vivacious young heroine is likewise
tortured to death over the course of nearly two full acts – a viscerally
engaging scene and a ghastly example of medieval entertainment at its basest.
Amida no munewari, a ko-jōruri play that was also performed as sekkyō by the
celebrity Edo chanter Tenma Hachidayū in the second half of the seven-
teenth century, tells of two orphaned children – a boy and a girl, ten and
twelve years old – who sell themselves into slavery in order to raise money to
conduct memorial services for their late parents. The man who buys them
needs to feed the sister’s raw, “living liver” to his son in order to cure him of a
curse. The sister agrees, but under the condition that she be paid in advance.
She is eventually saved by the statue of Amida Buddha that she commissions
with the money she receives.
The tale of the demon Shuten Dōji was also performed as ko-jōruri, and the
ko-jōruri prequel Shuten Dōji wakazakari (Shuten Dōji in His Prime), chanted
by Satsuma Dayū of Edo and published by Yamamoto Kuhei of Kyoto in the
eighth month of 1660, was clearly inspired by it or its related works. Based in
part on the ko-jōruri Kagekiyo (which was itself closely based on the kōwakamai
Kagekiyo), Shuten Dōji wakazakari tells of Shuten Dōji’s younger years as the
child Akudōmaru, or “evil boy.” The chanter explains that

The boy was named Akudōmaru, and by the time he was thirteen, he was
unlike any ordinary person. He was exceptionally tall, and when he glared
from between the strands of his wild, tangled mane, his eyes burned like fire.
The hairs on his mighty arms sprouted like copper needles, and when he was
enraged, he would smash mountains and pulverize boulders. If you were to
ask me to speak at length about this boy, then this is the tale that I would tell.

The chanter recounts how the boy was born in response to his father’s
prayers to the Togakushi Deity in Shinano Province; how he slaughtered 160
monks at Kugami Temple and burned down their buildings when he was sent
there to study; how he became the leader of a murderous band of ruffians and
terrorized the land; how he was caught and imprisoned by the emperor’s
men, only to escape with the aid of the Togakushi Deity; and how he was
abducted by a tengu and transformed into the demon Shuten Dōji by

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Maheśvara (J. Makeishuraō), a Buddhist incarnation of Śiva. In the final act of

the play, which echoes the ending of the otogizōshi Ibuki Dōji, Shuten Dōji is
driven off of Mount Hiei by Saichō, the founder of the Tendai Buddhist sect
in Japan. Although the work emphasizes (or even revels in) Shuten Dōji’s
depravity, it also celebrates Akudōmaru/Shuten Dōji for his extraordinary
filial piety, helping to establish him as one of the great antiheroes of the
seventeenth-century stage.
In their transcribed and published editions, particularly in illustrated yomi-
hon (novelistic) adaptations, sekkyō and ko-jōruri can be hard to tell apart
from otogizōshi and kōwakamai. The four genres share similar roots,
themes, and characters, and they are united in their broad popular appeal.
In Shikidō ōkagami (Great Mirror of the Way of Love, 1678) Fujimoto Kizan
wrote that “jōruri is a vulgar art, so well-to-do people should avoid chanting
it, even as amateurs.” The same might be said of sekkyō, and even the
reading and composition of some otogizōshi. But compared to many of the
more refined works of Japanese literature and drama, including the repertory
of medieval noh plays and the early modern works of Chikamatsu and other
later playwrights, sekkyō and ko-jōruri are remarkable for their energy,
vitality, and startlingly visceral appeal. Like otogizōshi and kōwakamai, the
plays have received short shrift in the modern period for their “rough edges”
– a lack of nuance or lyricism, or mistakes in their manuscript and wood-
block-printed editions – but they are exciting stories with a deeply affective
power. And like much of Ihara Saikaku’s fiction (composed between 1682 and
1693), which is in many ways indebted to these medieval literary and narrated
genres, they display an especially vibrant side of Japanese popular culture that
is indiscernible in some of the more highly regarded works of the premodern
period.

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*

THE EDO PERIOD (1600–1867)

 38
Introduction to early modern Japanese
literature
haruo shirane

One of the most dramatic transformations in Japanese literary history was the
transition from the medieval period to the early modern era (1600–1867), which
gave birth to a whole new body of vernacular and Sinitic literature. During the
seventeenth century, the samurai became the peacetime ruling class while
urban commoners (chōnin) gained economic and cultural power; access to
education was expanded via domain (han) schools for samurai and elementary
schools (terakoya) for commoners; and print culture came to the forefront – all
of which led to the widespread production and consumption of literature.
Until the seventeenth century, literary texts had been shared through
limited quantities of handwritten manuscripts, almost all of which belonged
to an elite group of aristocrats, educated priests, and high-ranking samurai. In
the medieval period, traveling minstrels (biwa hōshi) had recited military epics
such as The Tales of the Heike to a populace that could neither read nor write.
Even most samurai were illiterate, as were farmers and craftsmen. But in the
seventeenth century, with the emergence of new socioeconomic structures,
the government promotion of education, and the spread of print capitalism,
this situation changed drastically. By midcentury, almost all samurai – now a
bureaucratic elite – were able to read, as were the middle to upper levels of
the farmer, artisan, and merchant classes.
Knowledge of literature in the late medieval period, as epitomized by the
Kokin denju, the secret transmission of the Kokinshū (Collection of Ancient and
Modern Poems), consisted of varied monopolies on esoteric learning of the
Heian classical canon, transmitted as a rule to a select few through hereditary
or contractual ties. In the seventeenth century, by contrast, anyone who
could afford to pay for lessons could hire a “town teacher” (machi shishō) in
one of many fields of learning. The transmission of knowledge was no longer
dependent on the authority or patronage of the imperial court, the major
Buddhist temples, or powerful military lords.

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The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), the third and last of three major
warrior governments (the first two being the Kamakura and Muromachi
shogunates), was founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu three years after he van-
quished his rivals at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600. To control foreign trade
and diplomacy, the shogunate restricted many foreign contacts under the
seclusion (sakoku) edicts of 1633 to 1639; and to preserve social order at home,
it established a four-class system in which samurai, farmer, artisan, and
merchant (shi-nō-kō-shō) were subjugated to a strict hierarchy. Some terri-
tories, and the great cities, were controlled directly by the shogunate, but
most of the country was divided into domains (han) controlled by feudal lords
(daimyō). Some of these lords were Tokugawa offshoots; others were of
independent lineages. Their power was hereditary and they had vassals of
their own, but they held their domains at the pleasure of the shogunate,
which went to great lengths to prevent allegiances or conspiracy among
them. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Japan’s population had
reached nearly 30 million. Of this number, roughly 10 percent were samurai,
with ties of vassalage linking every man to his lord and ultimately to the
shogun. With a few exceptions, such as Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (r. 1680–1709),
Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–45), and Tokugawa Ienari (r. 1787–1837), who
wielded nearly absolute power, the shogun was usually overshadowed by
others in the administrative system, particularly the senior councilors, most
often house daimyō who met in formal council and conducted national and
foreign affairs. From time to time, powerful senior councilors such as
Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–88), Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758–1829), and Mizuno
Tadakuni (1794–1851) were able to dominate the council and control shogunal
policy.
Politically and financially, the Tokugawa shogunate was at its peak in the
seventeenth century. Thereafter, many of its daimyō controls lost their
efficacy, and its revenues began to decline. Periodic attempts were made to
restore both authority and solvency, first with the Kyōhō Reforms (1716–36),
carried out by the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune; then with the
Kansei Reforms (1787–93), executed by the senior councilor Matsudaira
Sadanobu; and finally with the Tenpō Reforms (1830–44), administered by
the senior councilor Mizuno Tadakuni. Although the Kyōhō Reforms tem-
porarily restabilized the finances of the Tokugawa shogunate, none of these
measures had lasting success. Most of the high points of early modern
literature – the Genroku era (1688–1704), the Hōreki-Tenmei era (1751–89),
and the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–29) – came before or after these major
reforms, when writers were relatively free and uncensored.

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The income for a samurai house was fixed according to hereditary criteria,
leaving rōnin (masterless samurai) and second or third sons in a precarious
financial situation. One result was that they often took up scholarship,
literature, religion, or the arts, in which they could establish a house of
their own. Many of the leading writers and scholars of the early modern
period were samurai who had either lost or become disillusioned with their
inherited positions and consequently sought alternative professions.
Although some writers – such as Ihara Saikaku, Santō Kyōden, and Shikitei
Sanba – were from artisan or merchant families, an overwhelming number
came from samurai families. Asai Ryōi, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Gion
Nankai, Hattori Nankaku, Hiraga Gennai, Koikawa Harumachi, Jippensha
Ikku, and Takizawa Bakin – to mention only the most prominent names –
were from warrior families, usually ones in severe decline. Even those not
normally associated with samurai, such as Matsuo Bashō, were descendants
of warriors. A few writers had a peasant background, perhaps the best known
being Issa, a haikai poet. Yosa Buson (the haikai poet and painter) was the son
of a well-to-do farmer.
The policy of the Tokugawa bakufu to place the samurai in the regional
castle towns and to force the daimyō to maintain permanent residences in the
new capital of Edo, combined with new transportation networks and com-
mercial infrastructure, resulted in the rapid development of cities. The local
domain products and the rice that the daimyō collected as taxes were sent to
and stored in the major cities, particularly Edo and Osaka, where they were
exchanged for currency. These cities, whose population exploded in the Edo
period, became the centers of literary production and consumption. In the
first half of the Edo period, publishing and literary production was centered in
the Kamigata area, specifically that of Kyoto (the old capital) and Osaka, the
new merchant metropolis. By the 1770s and 1780s, however, the center of
literary culture had gradually shifted to Edo, the political center, where the
shogun was stationed and where the daimyō had to spend a significant part of
their time.
Licensed quarters also played a major role in these major cities. In a
deliberate effort to bring prostitution under control, the bakufu consolidated
the existing brothels and placed them in designated licensed quarters
(yūkaku), which were usually located on the peripheries of large cities,
surrounded by a wall or moat. The bakufu eventually designated roughly
twenty such areas throughout the country, of which the largest and most
noteworthy were Shimabara in Kyoto, Yoshiwara in Edo, and Shinmachi in
Osaka, followed by Maruyama in Nagasaki. The explosion of popular

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literature in Edo in the late eighteenth century is exemplified by the sharebon

(books of wit and fashion) such as Yūshi hōgen (Playboy Dialect, 1770), which
described the ideal of tsū, or connoisseurship of the licensed quarters, speci-
fically that of Yoshiwara. In contrast to the wealthy merchant and daimyō
customers who supported the golden age of high courtesan culture in the
Kamigata area (Kyoto, Osaka, Sakai) in the seventeenth century, in Edo these
customers included petty merchants and middle- or lower-level samurai like
the one found in Playboy Dialect. The licensed quarters and the theater
districts, the two “bad places,” became closely linked. Kabuki drew much
of its subject matter from the licensed quarters, and ukiyo-e (colored wood-
block prints) depicted courtesans and kabuki actors. Even more importantly,
the licensed quarters became gathering places for intellectuals, artists, and
performers, whose work had a profound impact on contemporary literature,
theater, music, and art as well as on the fashions and customs of the times.
In the 1630s, movable type, convenient for printing Chinese graphs but not
for cursive kana, was replaced with multiple-use woodblocks, which were
more suitable for reproducing Japanese vernacular texts, particularly those
with complex annotations and illustrations. At about the same time, com-
mercial publishing houses opened, mainly in Kyoto. By the 1660s, a wide
variety of Japanese and Chinese texts were being published and sold in
bookstores and publishing houses in the three largest cities. Publication
was eventually based on an expected profit, of which the author was pro-
mised a certain amount, thus giving birth to the professional writer. Printed
texts also became the target of government censorship in a way that hand-
written texts never were. Works that touched on Tokugawa family matters
or other politically sensitive topics were banned, and writers who violated
these rules could be imprisoned.
Heian vernacular classics such as Hyakunin isshu, Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise,
and The Tale of Genji became basic reading for educated women in the Edo
period, but these works, particularly the longer ones, were generally read in
digest form, often with pictures, such as Osana Genji (Child Genji, 1665), a
popular kana-zōshi (kana booklet) by Nonoguchi Ryūho, or Onna Genji
kyōkun kagami (Women’s Genji, Lessons for Life, 1713), which combined
plot summaries of each chapter of The Tale of Genji with lessons from Onna
chōhōki (Record of Treasures for Women), a woman’s guide to everyday life.
Ethical handbooks such as Onna daigaku (Women’s Great Learning), which
reinforced conservative Confucian values, were used in schools, while illu-
strated digests such as Onna kyōkun shitsukekata (Lessons and Good Manners
for Women) combined didactic tales with commentary on classical stories.

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The early modern period produced few women writers in the field of
vernacular fiction. One exception was Arakida Reijo (1732–1806), who wrote
historical tales (monogatari) and Heian-style court romances between 1772 and
1781. Women, however, continued to write poetry, particularly waka and
haikai, as well as literary diaries and travel records, and they became a central
audience for both theater (kabuki and jōruri) and fiction. Readership for
ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), which dominated vernacular fiction
from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century,
appear to have been overwhelmingly male. The late eighteenth-century
yomihon (reading books) in the Kyoto-Osaka region were also targeted at
male readers. But in the nineteenth century, when the audience for fiction
expanded, two major genres of fiction, gōkan (bound picture books) and
ninjōbon (books of sentiment and romance), catered to a largely female
audience, and Tamenaga Shunsui, the principal writer of ninjōbon, had an
assistant writer who was a woman.
In contrast to kabuki, scripts of which were constantly rewritten and
meant for internal use, the libretti of the jōruri puppet theater were published
at the time of the first performance and were sometimes followed by
illustrated, easy-to-read digests, thereby making jōruri an important genre
of popular literature. Jōruri chanting also became a popular practice among
amateurs. Indeed, when the numbers of texts and performances, including
kabuki performances of jōruri plays, are combined, jōruri may have had the
widest audience of any artistic genre in the Edo period, and women
accounted for a large portion of that audience.
Warrior attitudes were reinforced by Confucian ethics and tended to be
highly moralistic, stressing self-sacrifice, honor, and obligation. The
Confucian virtues of filial piety and loyalty afforded the bakufu a basis for
reinforcing the rules of social hierarchy and the institutions of inheritance.
But with the disappearance of war and the need for income beyond the
monthly stipend, traditional warrior values began to collapse, and samurai
became increasingly interested in the culture of the urban commoners
(chōnin), such as pipe smoking, jōruri, kabuki, kouta (popular songs), and
involvement with prostitutes in the licensed quarters. With their finances
falling apart, the samurai turned to wealthy chōnin for support as adopted
sons. Samurai values also deeply infiltrated chōnin life: the relationship
between the employer and the employee in a merchant business, or between
master and apprentice in an artisan house, became infused with the notion of
obligation (giri) and service (hōkō). As urban commoners became wealthy,

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they indulged in cultural activities that earlier had been the province of elite
samurai, such as noh, tea, and ikebana (flower arranging).
Equally important, the ideals of the samurai, underpinned by Confucian
values, were reflected in the popular literature and drama of the period.
Almost from its beginnings, jōruri drama was centered on the notions of duty
as they became entangled and conflicted with love and human passion
(ninjō). Much of kabuki as well as popular fiction took the form of samurai
narratives, succession disputes in samurai houses (oiesōdō), or vendettas
(kataki-uchi), such as that found in Kanadehon Chūshingura (Treasury of
Loyal Retainers) in which a group of masterless samurai remain faithful to
a deceased master who had been, in their eyes, wrongly disgraced and
executed. It was only in the nineteenth century that a more degenerate
image of the samurai (as thieves and murderers), no doubt reflecting their
deteriorating financial condition, appeared on stage in kabuki plays such as
Tsuruya Nanboku’s Ghost Stories at Yotsuya and Kawatake Mokuami’s Aoto
zōshi hana no nishiki-e (Story of Aoto and the Gorgeous Woodblock Print),
also known as Benten kozō (Benten the Thief).
Ultimately, these two tendencies – the samurai emphasis on ethics, self-
sacrifice, political stability, and social order, and urban commoner interest in
money, social mobility, entertainment, and the play of human passions –
interacted in dynamic ways. Genres such as jōruri, kabuki, and yomihon are
usually divided into two basic formats, that of the sewa-mono, or contempor-
ary-life drama, and that of the jidai-mono, or period drama, with the former
reflecting urban commoner interests and the latter samurai values, at least on
the surface. Even when jōruri and kabuki shifted to historical plays after the
prohibition of love suicide plays (a type of sewa-mono) in the early eight-
eenth century, contemporary-life scenes were inserted into the larger histor-
ical drama so that “samurai” plays such as Chūshingura continued to revolve
around chōnin themes of money and thwarted love.
A prominent feature of Edo literature is the complex interplay between
two broad genealogies of literature and culture – the so-called refined (ga) and
popular (zoku). The high literature consisted of waka, kanshi (Chinese
poetry), monogatari (court tales), and related genres that had been developed
and practiced by the aristocracy in previous eras. These elegant genres tended
to stress courtly topics (such as nature, the four seasons, and love) in waka or
such traditional topics as the woes of the scholar/official in kanshi. Popular
literature, by contrast, was made up of new genres, often in the vernacular
but also in kanshi and kanbun, focused on urban society, and reflected
the ebullient, erotic, comic, and sometimes violent side of contemporary

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culture. At the heart of popular poetry were haikai, senryū (satiric haiku),
kyōka (wild poetry), and kyōshi (wild Chinese poetry), the latter three genres
emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century. The popular theatrical
genres were jōruri and kabuki, which stood in contrast to noh drama,
patronized by the elite samurai and now a form of classical theater.
Perhaps the most important form of popular literature in the seventeenth
century was haikai, or popular linked verse, permeated with what could be
called a “haikai spirit” (haii) that animated other genres as well. Wit was
generated by the transfusion of two opposing registers of style, seeking out
the classical past in the commoner present (for example, projecting Ariwara
no Narihira or the shining Genji onto an urban commoner, as Ihara Saikaku
did in his prose fiction) and finding the high in the low or the sacred in the
profane. As in Matsuo Bashō’s haikai, this kind of fusion could also elevate
and legitimize low or popular genres. Writers of prose fiction, driven by such
transgressive impulses, created a variety of genres: from kana-zōshi (kana
booklets), ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), kibyōshi (satiric and
didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), gōkan (bound
illustrated books), to yomihon (reading books) and kokkeibon (comic fiction).
Kangaku (Chinese studies) maintained its intellectual authority alongside
Kokugaku (nativist studies), which came to the fore in the late seventeenth
century and rose to prominence in the course of the eighteenth. These fields
were an integral part of “high” literary studies and were closely associated
with kanshi/kanbun and waka, respectively. Chinese studies in the seven-
teenth century initially concentrated on the study of Confucianism, particu-
larly that branch influenced by the Song period philosopher Zhu Xi
(1130–1200) and his followers. Later on Japanese Confucian scholars who
opposed this school of Song Confucianism emerged. Two major figures
were Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who tried to return
directly to the Confucian classics through a systematic philological and
historical study of ancient Chinese texts and who are today referred to as
members of the Ancient Studies (kogaku) school. Kokugaku nativism was
similar to Ancient Studies in its focus on systematic philological and historical
study of ancient texts. The Kokugaku scholars, who did not reach their peak
of influence until they were canonized in the modern period, examined and
promoted ancient Japanese texts such as the Man’yōshū (Anthology of Ten
Thousand Leaves) and the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters).
Ogyū Sorai’s school of Chinese studies centered on the literary composi-
tion of Chinese poetry and prose, thereby feeding into the bunjin (literatus)
movement that began in the early eighteenth century, led by kanshi poet-

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writers like Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759), one of Sorai’s disciples. Kokugaku

likewise was led by scholars with literary talents, such as Kamo no Mabuchi
(1697–1769), one of the best-known waka poets of the eighteenth century.
Scholarship and commentary, in fact, were inseparable from the practice of
such elite genres as kanshi and waka, which had been associated in the
medieval period with nobility and priesthood but increasingly became the
province of educated samurai and urban commoners such as Motoori
Norinaga (1730–1801), a key leader of the Kokugaku movement.
From the middle of the eighteenth century the center of cultural produc-
tion and consumption began to shift from the Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka)
region to Edo. Not surprisingly, writing by samurai intellectuals – such as
the Chinese studies of Ogyū Sorai, who worked in Edo – also shifted to the
east, the seat of political power. Until the mid eighteenth century, Edo
townspeople waited anxiously for the sale of ukiyo-zōshi published by the
Hachimonjiya and other Kyoto and Osaka publishers. In the seventeenth
century, Edo had been a city of strangers coming from all parts of the
country, mainly on the daimyō alternate attendance system. But by the
mid-eighteenth century, a distinct Edo dialect had developed, and socio-
economic growth created a cultural sphere that competed directly with the
Kyoto-Osaka region. However, the center for jōruri and much of kabuki
remained in Osaka, and eminent writers like Ueda Akinari and Yosa Buson
continued to work in the Kamigata area. The result was the development of
two very distinct sociolinguistic and cultural spheres.
In a society controlled by a hierarchical military organization, satire had its
limits. The notion of ugachi (hole digging), or of satirically viewing and
commenting on the “holes” or flaws in contemporary manners and mores,
was central to the new popular literature and to the “gesaku” (playful
writing) genres – senryū, kyōka, kyōshi, dangibon, sharebon, and kibyōshi –
that came to the fore in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Since writers
were subject to censorship or self-censorship, ideas had to be expressed in
roundabout ways. One way was through satire, to point to various foibles
and failings of the times that were normally hidden or covered over. The
person who practiced ugachi, however, was not a social critic or reformer;
instead, he pretended to be a casual bystander. It was often sufficient merely
to expose “the hole.” With a kind of twisted or inverted pride, gesaku writers
referred to their work deprecatingly as “useless” (muda).
Conventional literary histories consider the two high points of early
modern culture to be the Genroku era (1688–1704) and the Bunka-Bunsei
era (1804–29). The major figures in the first peak are thought to be Ihara

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Saikaku (1642–93), Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), and Chikamatsu Monzaemon

(1653–1725), while the major figures in the second peak are considered to be
Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848), Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), and Jippensha Ikku
(1765–1831). However, the century between the Genroku and the Bunka-
Bunsei eras created a rich and deep body of literature that fused elite and
popular as well as Chinese and Japanese cultural spheres. An unusual combi-
nation of humor, moral didacticism, and the fantastic inflects the work of
writers as diverse as Hiraga Gennai (1728–80), Yosa Buson (1716–83), and Ueda
Akinari (1734–1809), all of whom are also known as bunjin, or literati. A mark
of the bunjin was that he imagined himself (both in writing and in painting) as
inhabiting other worlds, those of China and of Japan in earlier times. In this
regard, the world of the bunjin overlapped and merged with those of the
Kokugaku scholars who turned their attention to an ancient (and often
imaginary) Japanese past.
By contrast, the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–29) is marked by the gradual loss
of these imaginary other worlds, a sobering return to everyday reality and
language, and the emergence of broad-based popular culture and literature
populated by commoners and samurai of diverse social affinities. In kanshi,
for example, poets moved away from the difficult neoclassical style of Ogyū
Sorai’s Ancient Rhetoric school, which had governed most of eighteenth-
century kanshi poetics, into the relaxed, everyday style of the Fresh Spirit
(seishin) movement, fostering the emergence of such down-to-earth kanshi
poets as Ryōkan (1758–1831). A parallel to this can be seen in the trend away
from the cerebral sharebon, driven by a tightly defined ideal of the connois-
seur of the licensed quarters, to the more popular, everyday romances of the
ninjōbon, which were widely read by women. If Buson’s haikai represent a
“departure from the common” (rizoku), Kobayashi Issa’s (1763–1827) haikai
marks a return to the quotidian. A notable exception here is late yomihon,
such as Bakin’s Nansō satomi hakkenden (The Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of
the Nansō Satomi Clan, 1814–42), which was heavily influenced by the Ming
vernacular novel (particularly The Water Margin) and represents an explora-
tion of historical and fantastic worlds. But as a general trend, authors of the
early nineteenth century moved away from the richly imaginative tendencies
of the eighteenth century to refocus on the everyday world, as exemplified by
the travels and escapades of two rambunctious commoners, Yaji and
Kitahachi, in the most famous kokkeibon (comic novel), Tōkaidōchū hizaku-
rige (Shank’s Mare, 1802–14), by Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831).

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 39
Publishing and the book in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
p. f. kornicki

Printing technology was first developed in China in the seventh century if not
earlier and written texts were printed on paper there earlier than in any other
society in the world. From China the technology of printing using wooden
blocks was transmitted to Korea and ultimately to Japan, where the first
records of printing, and the first surviving printed texts, date from the eighth
century. However, although printing was transmitted to Japan so early in its
recorded history, printing has had a very different social trajectory there from
that which it followed in Europe: it is striking, for example, that in Japan
printing had only a limited impact upon the production of books and the
circulation of texts until the seventeenth century. Before 1600 there was in
effect a sharp divide between books in Japanese, which for centuries circu-
lated only in the form of manuscripts, and books in Chinese, which were
much more likely to be printed, especially if they were Buddhist texts.
There can be no doubt that the development of printing in Buddhist Asia is
closely tied to the ritual reproduction of texts rather than to their production
for reading. Ample evidence survives of the practice of ritual printing in Japan
in the eighth century (of the printed invocations making up the Hyakumantō
Dharani several thousand are still extant), while the printing of texts for
reading or study can only be dated to the eleventh century, when commen-
taries on Buddhist sutras were first printed. Well before this time printing in
China had already embraced the production of calendars and other secular
works; in Japan, by contrast, up to the end of the sixteenth century printing
was characterized by the dominance of Chinese texts, all but a few of which
were Buddhist texts printed by monasteries. There was no sign of any
commercial publishing of any kind, let alone publishing of Japanese texts.
This imbalance defies easy explanation. After all, a sword-smith named
Izumi-no-kami Kanesada published a copy of the Kannongyō (a section of
the Lotus Sutra) in 1504, showing that monasteries did not enjoy a monopoly

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on printing Buddhist texts and that individuals could sponsor printing if they
so wished. A more telling example is the fact that, in the province of Suō, a
number of secular books were printed by vassals of the Ōuchi daimyō in the
closing years of the fifteenth century, including Shūbun inryaku, a dictionary
for the composition of Chinese poetry compiled by Kokan Shiren (1278–1346).
This was a secular work of Japanese authorship, albeit in Chinese. Why not
go one step further and print a Japanese work? There were no technical or
legal obstacles to doing so, and the explanation must rather lie in the extrinsic
characteristics of Japanese literature: the hermetic courtly ambience in which
most of it was transmitted, the oral and personal context in which works
were interpreted and in which copies were made. It goes without saying that
because Japanese literature remained locked in scribal traditions many works
were lost before print gave them better chances of survival from the early
seventeenth century onwards.
In the context of premodern Japan, “printing” of course means woodblock
printing, or xylography, a technology that originated in China in the seventh
century. It is in essence a technology for the reproduction of handwritten
texts, for it involves pasting an inverted manuscript on to a wooden block,
cutting out the white parts to a depth of a few millimetres to leave the text
standing in relief, and finally applying ink and paper to transfer the text from
the wooden block to the paper. This technology possessed some distinct
advantages. It was a simple matter, for example, to include illustrations or
other non-textual material (mathematical formulae, kimono designs, and the
state of play in board games such as go), as well as kunten reading marks to
enable Japanese readers to construe Chinese texts. Of perhaps equal impor-
tance was the fact that each text retained a calligraphic personality rather than
the impersonality of a standard typeface: the text stared at each reader with
the idiosyncrasies and quality (good or bad) of the calligraphy of the person
who had copied out the text. A form of printing it indubitably was, but at the
same time it retained close connections with scribal traditions.
Woodblock printing was the norm throughout the Edo period, but in the
second half of the sixteenth century typography reached Japan from two very
different sources and enjoyed several decades of success. One of those
sources was Europe, for in 1590 the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano brought a
movable-type printing press to Japan for use by the Jesuit missionaries. This
was used to print works in Latin, in transliterated Japanese and in kana and
characters, perhaps as many as a hundred titles in all, though copies of only
forty survive. Most of the output was devotional but there were some secular
works as well, including the speeches of Cicero and part of the Heike

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 p. f. kornicki

monogatari (The Tales of the Heike): this last, printed in 1592 in transliterated
Japanese, was the first work of Japanese literature ever to be printed. The
Jesuits were, however, forced to abandon their printing activities once the
suppression of Christianity became severe in the early seventeenth century.
The other source of typography was Korea, for the technology of printing
with metallic movable type had been put to extensive use by Korean printers
from the thirteenth century onwards, and most likely earlier. There is no
record, however, of typographically printed books reaching Japan from
Korea until the closing years of the sixteenth century, when Hideyoshi’s
troops brought back as booty not only cartloads of books but also a font of
printing type, which was presented to Emperor GoYōzei and immediately
used in 1593 to print a version of the Xiao jing (Classic of Filial Piety, J. Kōkyō).
GoYozei then had a font of wooden type cut, which was used to print various
works in Chinese, including the Sishu (J. Shisho) – the Four Books of the
Confucian tradition – and the first part of the Nihon shoki.
To which of these two typographic traditions did Japanese printers turn?
Given that most of the Jesuit printing was concentrated in Kyushu, far from
the centers of power, and was tainted by the association with Christianity
once persecution got under way, it seems obvious that the Korean tradition
would have been more influential. On the other hand, though, the Korean
tradition was used exclusively for printing Chinese books, while it was the
Jesuits who had pioneered the printing of Japanese texts and the use of kana
in print. What is indisputable is that both traditions steered printing in Japan
away from the monastic model, which had hitherto produced little more
than sutras and devotional texts in Chinese; instead, the hallmarks of Japanese
typography were secularization and vernacularization. Secularization
ensured that many Chinese literary, philosophical, and historical works
became easily available in print in Japan, and as the works of the Confucian
tradition became the cornerstone of educational practice the demand for
Japanese editions, with assorted reading aids to help readers construe the text,
remained buoyant throughout the Edo period. To be sure, Buddhist sutras
and devotional works continued to be printed in quantity, at least in the
seventeenth century, but they no longer dominated market provision.
Vernacularization, on the other hand, made Japanese a print language and
brought Japanese writing onto the print market for the first time.
For the first forty years of the seventeenth century, typography flourished
in Japanese soil, albeit not to the exclusion of woodblock printing. At first,
typography took the form of editions sponsored by successive emperors, by
Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, by some Buddhist temples, and by private

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individuals such as medical doctors. By far the most famous examples of

typography in the first decade were the so-called Sagabon, books printed in
Saga, to the west of Kyoto, by a wealthy merchant, Suminokura Soan, and
the calligrapher and arbiter of taste Hon’ami Kōetsu. The Sagabon were the
first manifestation of vernacularization, for almost all of them were Japanese
texts, like the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise), Tsurezuregusa (Essays in
Idleness), and noh libretti. But they also made the book a work of art: fine
papers were used (colored or patterned), illustrations were adapted from the
manuscript traditions, and the type was modeled on the hand of Kōetsu
himself, complete with ligatures to reproduce the flow of his calligraphy. At
this stage it is not clear if we are talking about publication or not, for we do
not know if any of these works printed typographically were made available
to the public. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, however,
mercantile commercial publishers had begun to operate, at first in Kyoto and
then in Edo, and some of them adopted typography.
By the 1640s, however, typography in Japan was in terminal decline and it
was defunct by 1660. Why should such an apparent technological “regres-
sion” to woodblock printing have occurred? It is essential to note that at issue
is not simply the practice of printing but commercial publishing. Typography
was not an ideal solution to the requirements of the market in seventeenth-
century Japan. Firstly, it required the maintenance of a very large font of
characters and kana; given that wooden type was the norm and that it was
given to warping and splitting, replacement was frequently necessary.
Secondly, illustration had rapidly become an important element of the
book, partly under the influence of imported Ming illustrated books, and
this could only be provided using wood blocks; thus publishers who used
typography had to retain woodblock technology for illustrations. And thirdly,
vernacularization forced publishers to make difficult choices about register,
that is, about kanji literacy, and the desire to add small furigana glosses
alongside characters militated against typography. By contrast, woodblock
printing rendered fonts unnecessary, coped with illustrations, and permitted
the addition of all sorts of glosses and other aids to reading; what is more, it
allowed publishers to respond to the slow markets of the seventeenth century
by printing extra copies from existing blocks from time to time. There is,
therefore, nothing extraordinary about the ascendancy of xylography in the
Edo period.
For the remainder of the Edo period, publishing was exclusively based
upon the woodblock-printed text. This had inescapable consequences for the
generation and reproduction of literary works. One was the symbiosis of text

385
 p. f. kornicki

and image, which publishers drew attention to by making sure that the titles
of their wares carried the word eiri (illustrated) as a prefix. Indeed, it was
illustrators such as Hishikawa Moronobu and Yoshida Hanbei in the seven-
teenth century whose names featured in books, when the texts they were
illustrating were often published without indication of authorship. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the close relationship between fiction
and illustration was maintained by prominent artists like Nishikawa
Sukenobu and Katsushika Hokusai. Secondly, books were likely to remain
in print for as long as the blocks could produce legible copies, which in some
cases was more than a hundred years. The blocks represented a capital
investment and so they could be, and often were, sold to other publishers
who could either try to find new markets or, more unscrupulously, change a
book’s title and try to pass it off as a new publication; this was the common
fate of many works of fiction produced in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. A third consequence was the limitation on the number
of copies that could be produced, for after a couple of thousand copies the
wear and tear on the blocks considerably reduced the quality of the printed
impression. This was not a problem in the seventeenth century, when sales of
several hundred copies were considered very satisfactory, but by the nine-
teenth century publishers were forced to consider having the printing blocks
recarved to meet demand. On the other hand, the simplicity of xylography
made it possible for groups of haikai enthusiasts to have their poems printed
privately and thus the poems of many local groups in the provinces, and in
particular of many women poets, have been preserved in print.
As the example of the haikai enthusiasts shows, private publication was a
possibility in the Edo period, and was adopted by some Buddhist temples as
well as by ikebana (flower arranging) circles. But such private publications
represented a mere fraction of the total, and it was instead commercial
publishing that furnished the mechanisms for the production and dissemina-
tion of most literary works. Unfortunately, any attempt to understand the
finances of commercial publishing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries is beset by the lack of documentary material; apart from a few anecdotal
references we know nothing of printing and binding costs, break-even points,
sales figures, and so on. On the other hand, we do know how the book trade
operated and how manufactured books reached their readers.
Commercial publishing began in Kyoto in the early years of the seven-
teenth century and was dominated at least until the end of the century by a
group of ten booksellers of mercantile status; one of them, the firm of
Murakami Kanbei (Heirakuji), is still in business. These “booksellers”

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 Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

(known in Japanese by a variety of names including mononohon’ya, hon’ya,

shorin, and shoshi) usually combined a number of operations: the printing and
binding was carried out in-house, the shop-front offered new publications for
sale, and the premises were also often used as the base for second-hand
bookselling, book-lending, and distance-selling by itinerant salesmen.
By the 1660s the book trade had established itself in the three main cities of
Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, although for most of the seventeenth century many
of the booksellers of Osaka and Edo were little more than branches or agents
of Kyoto firms. Books printed in Kyoto rapidly enjoyed a wide, even national,
circulation: the diaries and letters of Kaibara Ekiken and other intellectuals
show that books were reaching northern Kyushu, Wakayama, Kanazawa,
and other castle towns, presumably taking advantage of the coastal transpor-
tation network. By the end of the eighteenth century the cultural leadership
of Kyoto in book production was under challenge from Edo, particularly with
the development of new genres of fiction such as kibyōshi, sharebon, and
later yomihon, ninjōbon, and kokkeibon. It was at that time that Edo
publishers like Subaraya Mohei, who had the license to print bukan (samurai
directories), and Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who started out by selling guides to the
Yoshiwara brothel district, began to establish themselves as a presence on the
national market as Edo genres of fiction came to dominate it. Nevertheless,
Edo never dominated Japanese publishing in the way that Tokyo would in
the twentieth century. Apart from the continuing activities of Kyoto publish-
ers, who concentrated on Buddhist, Sinological and medical texts, art books,
and other staples of the book trade, there were by the end of the eighteenth
century publishers active in a number of the larger castle towns, especially
Nagoya, Wakayama, Sendai, Kanazawa, and Hiroshima; among other things,
they published the works of local intellectuals and the collections of local
haikai poets, often in conjunction with metropolitan publishers to ensure a
wide circulation. Thus, for example, many of the nativist study writings of
Motoori Norinaga and his intellectual successors were published in
Matsuzaka or Wakayama but achieved national circulation.
Well before the end of the seventeenth century the book trade had found
itself dealing with a bewildering quantity of publications. To bring some order
and to facilitate access to information about books in print the trade began to
issue booksellers’ catalogues (shojaku mokuroku) which listed books that were
commercially available or were about to become so. The first of these was
published c. 1666 and there were new or revised editions every few years up to
1729; thereafter there were fewer editions, presumably because the quantities
had become unmanageably large and in any case publishers were by then

387
 p. f. kornicki

issuing individual catalogues of their own books in print. The booksellers’

catalogues were never comprehensive – they excluded erotica, ephemera,
private publications, and publications of the Bakufu Academy and domain
schools – but the jump from the fewer than four thousand items listed in the
1670 catalogue to the eight thousand items listed in the 1696 catalogue indicates
the vigour of the book trade and the capacity of the market. Some of these
catalogues give prices, from which it is apparent, for example, that illustrated
editions of The Tales of Ise could be had for less than two momme at a time when
the daily wages of skilled labourers were three momme. But prices were not
fixed: they depended on the quality of the paper and the covers, and supple-
ments were sometimes charged to cover long-distance shipment.
By the end of the seventeenth century the book trade had become more
commercially astute and had begun to organize itself. Booksellers’ guilds
(hon’ya nakama) were recognized by the bakufu in 1716 (Kyoto), in 1721 (Edo),
and in 1723 (Osaka). In this way existing arrangements for the protection of
the book trade were given official recognition. In return for a fixed annual
payment, guild members enjoyed a monopoly of the right to publish and
some protection from copyright infringements (copyright lay at this time
with publishers rather than with authors), while the bakufu acquired a
mechanism for controlling the alarmingly vigorous book trade: for the
bakufu, the principal function of the guilds was to exercise the functions of
censorship (see below). Meanwhile, the book trade had recognized the value
of celebrity authorship: whereas few of Ihara Saikaku’s works carry his name,
the works of his successors as novelists in the early eighteenth century, Ejima
Kiseki and Hachimonjiya Jishō, routinely appear at the head of the text. At
around the same time it became common for books to contain at the back at
least a page giving details of other publications by the same author or of the
publisher’s current list.
Although publishers recognized the commercial value of successful
authors, they do not seem to have been unduly keen to pay them. It has
often been supposed that Kyokutei Bakin in the early nineteenth century was
the first writer in Japan to make a living from writing. Whether this is true or
not, he was definitely not the first author to be paid for his work. An anecdote
told of Saikaku by one of his contemporaries has him failing to produce a
work for which he had already received an advance payment; at the very least
this indicates that the notion of being paid for literary work, and the
vocabulary to express it, was already current by the early eighteenth century.
But it is not until the end of the century that we find incontrovertible
evidence of authors such as Bakin and Santō Kyōden being routinely paid

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 Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

for their writings. Thus while it is clear that there was a commercial nexus
linking publishers to their products, it is not clear that authors had a strong
commercial interest in their works until the 1790s.
The advent of commercial publishing thus not only made texts available to
wider publics than before, it also packaged, marketed, and distributed even
classic texts in ways that gave them new meanings as the book trade grew to
maturity in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas
the Sagabon editions of The Tales of Ise, for example, had consisted of the
unadorned text and nothing extra apart from the illustrations, which had in
any case been integral to the scribal transmission of the text, later editions
came packaged entirely differently. The subtitle on the cover might proclaim
that this was a new edition (irrespective of whether it was or not) and fully
illustrated; the preface by some distinguished figure would place it in an
intellectual setting; and the names of the editors and/or illustrators would
now figure prominently at the outset. And at the end the reader would find a
list of other publications from the same bookseller. Thus the text was no
longer enough in a market in which publishers were in competition and
famous names were now being used to sell books.
What did the newly established commercial publishers of the early seven-
teenth century produce for the market? By the end of the century their range
covered not only all genres of medieval Japan but also new forms of writing
anchored more explicitly in the contemporary urban marketplace; their first
and most important overall contribution, however, was undoubtedly the
permanent secularization and vernacularization of the book. It is true, they
did continue to print considerable quantities of Buddhist texts, and there was
clearly a commercial demand for them, but their output was dominated
instead by Japanese books of all sorts and by secular Chinese texts, including
both the classics such as the Classic of Filial Piety and literary works such as the
popular anthology of Tang verse Tōshisen (Ch. Tangshi xuan).
There has long been a tendency to disregard the printing and circulation of
Chinese texts in Japan, as if, being in Chinese, they were not part of Japanese
print culture. This is, however, to distort not only the history of the book in
Japan but also the shape of Japanese culture in the Edo period. For most of the
period intellectual discourse at the highest level was predicated on a knowl-
edge of Chinese and familiarity with Chinese texts, and the key texts were
just as much a part of education in private elementary schools (terakoya) as
they were in the Bakufu Academy and the domain schools for high-ranking
samurai. Not surprisingly, therefore, Chinese texts circulated in a bewildering
variety of editions: there were imported Chinese and Korean imprints, which

389
 p. f. kornicki

were highly sought after but required a high level of Sinological literacy, like
unglossed Japanese editions, and there were Japanese editions replete with
notes, glosses, and other material provided by Japanese editors. Tōshisen, for
example, was in the nineteenth century available in more than forty different
editions published by Suwaraya Shinhei of Edo, each varying in size, illustra-
tions, and exegetical material. These Sinological texts were an indispensable
part of any intellectual’s library, but they were also to be found in the modest
collections of village elders, who were perhaps aspiring to elite culture in an
attempt to underline the status differences between themselves and humble
cultivators. It was, of course, print that made it possible for these texts to
spread beyond the elite and to become the cornerstone of education. Given
that the Chinese classics, and later on Ming fiction as well, were such an
abiding point of reference in the literature of the Edo period and given that a
number of women such as Ema Saikō became expert exponents of kanshi
(Chinese poetry), the Sinological acculturation of non-elites and of women is
of no small importance.
The Japanese books printed in the seventeenth century consisted in the
first instance predominantly of the literature of past ages, texts that had
circulated for centuries in manuscript. Thus in the first few decades of the
seventeenth century innumerable different editions appeared of The Tale of
Genji, The Tales of Ise, Essays in Idleness, Taiheiki, and other prose works in the
canon. The earliest editions consisted of little more than the text, and some of
these works, especially The Tale of Genji, were far from easy to read and
required instruction or assistance that these editions did not furnish.
However, publishers gradually sought to make these works accessible to a
new market of readers by illustrating them lavishly, by appending glosses or
full commentaries, and sometimes by producing simplified and abbreviated
editions. Thus readers who might have found the bare text of the Genji
without notes or glosses rather daunting could turn with relief to the
definitive commentary in sixty-two volumes (Kogetsushō, 1673) prepared by
the prominent poet and scholar Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705), and if that was
too intimidating or costly, they could always have recourse to Genji kokagami
(Little Mirror of the Genji) or Jūjō Genji (Genji in Ten Chapters), both of
which appeared in countless different editions in the seventeenth century.
There can be no doubt that the Genji and other classic works were now
reaching new readers with different needs and requirements from those of
earlier generations who had approached them in manuscript and with the
help of a tutor. In the eighteenth century this process went further as
Nishikawa Sukenobu began producing picture-book versions of the classics

390
 Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

published by Kikuya Kihei of Kyoto, such as Ehon tsurezuregusa (1740; based

on Essays in Idleness) and Ehon asahiyama (based on the Pillow Book).
Although new types of fiction, written mostly in kana, did emerge in the
seventeenth century, it is likely that the more important literary genres from
the point of view of the book trade were haikai poetry and playbooks. The
first haikai collection was Enokoshū (1633), which was published by a monastic
printer in Kyoto and contained the works of 178 poets from five different
provinces; this was followed by Gyokukaishū in 1656, which contained verses
by 658 people from thirty-seven provinces, thus showing the growth of the
haikai-composing population. By the 1670s several booksellers had decided to
specialize in the publication of haikai books, notably Izutsuya Shōhei of
Kyoto; the founder was a follower of the celebrated poet Matsunaga
Teitoku who published his first haikai book in 1652, and the firm lasted for
five generations. Before long haikai books offered more than just texts as they
began to partake increasingly in the arts of the book: the first illustrated
example was Inago (1656), a collection of the verses of Kitamura Kigin, but by
the second half of the eighteenth century haikai books were often accom-
panied by exquisite polychrome illustrations by prominent artists like
Katsuma Ryūsui and Hanabusa Ippō.
Similarly, the rise of the kabuki and bunraku theaters created an opportu-
nity and a demand that Osaka booksellers, in particular, were not slow to take
advantage of. Unfortunately, many of these publications were ephemeral in
nature and survival rates from the seventeenth century are poor. The oldest
extant book of actor critiques, Yarōmushi, dates from 1660 but was surely not
the first of its kind. Theater-related publications took many forms apart from
actor critiques, theater programmes (banzuke), and actor prints, all of which
were staples of the theater publishing industry. For example, the texts of plays
or parts of plays were made available to the theater-going public in the form
of shōhon, or authenticated playbooks, and as recitation became a popular
leisure activity these were adapted for the use of amateurs with the addition
of some marginal aids to recitation (keikobon, or practice books). In Osaka the
texts of plays were transformed after the performances were over into a new
form of book, the eiri-nehon, which was an illustrated version of the text for
reading rather than recitation; in the 1790s these became lavish products with
full color illustrations. This by no means exhausts the range of publications
deriving from the kabuki theater, but in view of the close relationship
between the kabuki theater and the fictional literature of Edo, and in
particular the prominence of dialogue rather than narrative, the profusion

391
 p. f. kornicki

of theater-related publications was indubitably of importance in shaping

literary sensibilities in the Edo period.
Who was reading all these books? It is incontrovertible that the new
market of readers was predominantly urban, embraced both samurai and
those of plebeian status (i.e. merchants and artisans), and included women as
well as men. The concentration of readers in towns is evident from the urban
setting of fictional works and from the proliferation of practical publications
aimed at urban dwellers, such as detailed city maps. This is not to say that
rural readers did not exist, for we know of Osaka booksellers who were
hawking their books around the rural hinterland, but it was much truer now
than it had been earlier that Japanese literature was being produced in the big
cities primarily for the consumption of their large populations. The social
composition of the intended and actual audience for books is more difficult to
grasp, but the emergence of plebeian heroes in fictional works such as Ukiyo
monogatari (Tales of the Floating World, 1661) and the publication of didactic
books for merchants like Chōninbukuro (The Townsman’s Bag, 1719) demon-
strate that samurai did not monopolize the readership of printed books; given
that samurai were notionally forbidden to attend kabuki performances, it
may be hypothesized that most of the market for theater publications was
plebeian as well. Women readers had hitherto been a neglected component
of the market for books, but publishers were quick to recognize their
commercial potential: by the end of the seventeenth century book catalogues
included a section of nyosho (books for women) and publishers were already
producing a range of books with titles identifying them as intended for
women readers. These included works such as Onnayō kinmō zui
(Encyclopedia for Women, 1687) and Onna hyakunin isshu (Women’s
Hundred Poems from a Hundred Poets, 1688), as well as numerous calligra-
phy guides, letter-writers, and conduct books for women. The most con-
tentious issue, however, was that of the classic works of Japanese literature
such as The Tale of Genji: although most of them had been written by women
and had for centuries dominated the canon, male Sinologists like Hayashi
Razan (1583–1657) and his followers had grave doubts about the suitability for
women of such works dealing with emotional relationships between the
sexes. In part their anxiety was fueled by the very fact that print had now
made The Tale of Genji easily accessible and they sought to urge women to
read more uplifting literature, but for all that The Tale of Genji remained
indispensable as a source of knowledge about waka poetry, courtly etiquette,
and courtly sensibilities, and for these reasons conduct books openly urged
women to read it.

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For would-be readers, what alternative was there to buying a book? For
samurai there were the Bakufu Library and the libraries of the various
domain schools, but access to these was restricted and in most cases the
stock consisted overwhelmingly of Sinological texts and commentaries.
Public libraries did not exist, so the only alternative was to borrow a book
from an acquaintance or from a bookseller. Surviving diaries and letters show
that particularly in rural settings where books were rare it was common
practice to borrow and to lend, and some owners went to the trouble of
writing in their books a plea for a speedy return. Commercial book-lending,
on the other hand, probably became a standard practice at the end of the
seventeenth century as a side-line for urban booksellers, but in the eighteenth
century independent lending libraries (kashihon’ya) became the norm. Unlike
circulating libraries in Europe, the proprietors customarily carried their wares
around on their back, exchanging new books for old. They operated in all the
castle towns and in various hot-spring resorts, post-towns on the major
highways, and other settlements from one end of Japan to the other, and
they thus contributed to the development of a national book culture whereby
the books produced in Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka reached all corners of Japan.
The mainstay of their stock was usually fictional literature, and the letters of
Bakin show that his historical romances (yomihon) like Nansō satomi hakken-
den (The Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Nansō Satomi Clan, 1814–42)
were too expensive for most readers and that publication was dependent
upon the willingness of kashihon’ya to purchase them for their customers.
Edo period readers were not in the habit of writing marginal notes in their
books or of keeping reading diaries, so it is difficult to gauge how they read
and what impact their reading had on them. However, the survival of
inventories of books or of intact collections enables us to assess the reading
tastes of intellectuals as well as of rural cultivators, and it is striking that rural
book-owners often counted basic Sinological texts among their books and
that at all levels the ownership of banned books was widespread. How
effective, then, was censorship in this period?
Organized censorship in Japan was unknown before the Edo period, and
even after 1600 there can be no doubt that the bakufu was slow to appreciate
the potential dangers of commercial publishing. In the seventeenth century
there were two subjects which printed books could not touch: one was
Christianity, and in 1630 strict controls were placed on the importation of
books from China at Nagasaki to make sure that no Chinese translations of
works by Jesuit missionaries entered Japan; the other was Toyotomi
Hideyoshi and the process whereby Tokugawa Ieyasu supplanted his heirs.

393
 p. f. kornicki

A number of books on these proscribed subjects were banned in the course of

the seventeenth century, and from at least 1673 onwards the bakufu began
issuing censorship edicts designed to exercise more control. These were
vaguely worded but in practice excluded from the realm of commercial
publishing sensational events and other kinds of news, all forms of erotica,
and anything to do with the shogun, the bakufu, daimyō, and other high-
ranking samurai. Thus the events connected with the revenge of the forty-six
rōnin in 1702 were out of bounds on several counts, so an account of the
sensational vendetta published in 1719 was immediately banned, although
copies were available in bookshops and manuscript versions made good the
shortage of printed copies.
It was the guilds that were responsible for exercising pre-publication
censorship and their responsibilities were made more burdensome in new
censorship legislation promulgated in 1721–2, which required, among other
things, the names of the author and the publisher to be clearly displayed in
the colophon. The vagueness of the definition of unacceptable subject matter
made inspection of proposed books a tricky business, for the guild inspectors
were also punished if a book that had been passed for publication was
subsequently banned. This happened in the 1790s and the 1840s, two occa-
sions when the bakufu cracked down on popular literature.
The impact of censorship on Japanese literature during the Edo period was
somewhat haphazard but it was real enough to encourage writers and the
guilds to engage in preventive self-censorship and to encourage writers to
adopt spurious historical settings if they wished to write about contemporary
matters, as was the case, for example, with Chūshingura and other versions of
the revenge of the forty-six rōnin. There were two ways around censorship:
one was to resort to underground publishing with no indication of the pub-
lisher, which was the preferred route for erotica, and the other was to resort to
manuscript circulation instead, which is the subject of the following section.
Given the rapid rise of commercial publishing in the Edo period, it is
inevitable that the history of Japanese literature in that period has always
been written in terms of printed literature. However, this is to neglect the
survival of manuscript traditions in the midst of print. Literary manuscripts
were not necessarily produced only for private consumption but can be
shown in some cases to have been sold and circulated in the same ways as
printed books, and many booksellers’ advertisements made it perfectly clear
to their customers that they had manuscripts as well as printed books to offer.
There is one important area of literary production that bypassed print in
the Edo period and rarely features in literary histories. It is the jitsurokutai

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shōsetsu, a generic term for fictionalized accounts of recent scandalous or

sensational events. It was not possible to print these works for the censorship
legislation in the Edo period forbad the treatment of any such matters in
commercial print, but that did not stop them from circulating widely,
through booksellers and lending libraries. They were invariably anonymous,
for the bakufu made even the circulation of such manuscripts an offense,
even though the factual content was tempered with fictional elements. The
balance between fiction and fact is in most cases difficult to establish, but the
dialogue is obviously fictional while legal judgments and documents cited
were often authentic; the accuracy of the narrative, however, is often
impossible now to establish.
This was an extremely popular genre of fiction, albeit one routinely
omitted from literary histories. One example out of many is Keian taiheiki
(The Turmoil in the Keian Era), which is anonymous like most works in this
genre. It treats of the failed insurrection against the bakufu plotted by Yui
Shōsetsu (1605–51) in the fourth year of the Keian era (1651). Yui Shōsetsu was
an expert on military tactics, and although the plot was betrayed and he
committed suicide the threat to the bakufu had been real. The Turmoil in the
Keian Era is thought to have been written in the early eighteenth century. In
1771 it was included in Kinsho mokuroku (Catalogue of Proscribed Books),
which was printed by the booksellers’ guild of Kyoto, ostensibly in order to
alert the trade to books that should not be handled; an appendix contains a
long list of proscribed books, including very many manuscripts on topics such
as the Akō incident (the revenge of the forty-six rōnin), various scandals
involving daimyō, and sensational vendettas. So by this time The Turmoil in
the Keian Era was clearly known to Kyoto booksellers, and in all likelihood
available there. When surviving copies are transposed onto a map of Japan
(so far fifty manuscripts that give an indication of where they were copied or
read are known), it is clear that the work had reached all parts of Japan from
the southern tip of Hokkaido to Kyushu; what is more, the enormous Daisō
lending library of Nagoya had no fewer than five copies to offer customers, a
clear sign of its popularity.
What was true of The Turmoil in the Keian Era was true of numerous other
illicit manuscripts, including not only fictionalized accounts of sensational
events but also historical works questioning the legitimacy of the bakufu and
studies of the threats to Japan’s security. In this respect, manuscripts were
being “published” and circulated in the Edo period alongside printed pub-
lications, which were the dominant, but not the only, form of literary
production.

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Kamigata commercial prose
laura moretti

How might we construct a history of seventeenth-century prose literature

that is respectful of its historical contours and development? What role
should we assign to Ihara Saikaku in our account? Should we recognize a
caesura at some point in the evolution of this prose literature? If so, where
should we posit it? This chapter explores these issues by redefining the
boundaries of seventeenth-century literature, by examining its contents and
features, and by reflecting on its legacy throughout the early modern period.
To use a metaphor from the Edo period, by the end of the seventeenth
century woodblock printing had given rise to a forest of books (fumihayashi)
that was growing ever more luxuriant. This metaphor well describes the
large number of books that were produced, their variety, and their power to
address a vast public that was no longer restricted to the intelligentsia but
potentially included peasants, artisans, and merchants. How can we disen-
tangle the intricate branches that fill this forest?
Shojaku mokuroku, book-trade catalogues produced by Kyoto publishers/
booksellers, provide a hint. The 1666–7 catalogue divides books into twenty-
two categories, which can be divided into four main groups. Most of the titles
listed are books in Chinese – mainly Buddhist scriptures and commentaries,
Confucian texts, Shintō books, dictionaries, Chinese poetry anthologies,
medical books, and military treatises. The second largest group consists of
books devoted to Japanese poetry, namely waka, renga, and haikai, and Heian
period monogatari. The third consists of books written in vernacular Japanese,
organized into “Japanese books and items in the kana syllabary” (washo narabi
ni kanarui), “dance performance manuscripts and booklets” (mai narabi ni
sōshi), and “primers and copybooks” (ōraimono narabi ni tehon). The fourth
group deals with visual matters of different kinds (surimono narabi ni ezu).
Whereas the texts included in the first group require a thorough knowl-
edge of classical Chinese on the part of the reader/consumer/user, those in

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the third group potentially address the semi-literate reader through the use of
kana combined with kanji (Chinese characters) accompanied by their pho-
netic readings. It is the third group that is of primary interest to us here, and
within it washo and sōshi in particular, as these are the first early modern
commercially printed popular Japanese prose.1 These works can be compared
to some of the popular prose in early modern Europe such as English and
Scottish chapbooks and the French Bibliothèque bleue, which share a similar
textual variety.
As encountered in the 1670 book-trade catalogue, the category of washo
(also named kana washo) comprises didactic literature that dispensed knowl-
edge. Here “knowledge” might be compared with Peter Burke’s definition of
knowledge in the field of Western social history as “what has been ‘cooked,’
processed or systematized by thought.”2 These texts represent one response
of learned culture to a growing need for the dissemination of knowledge
throughout Japanese society, regardless of literacy skills. Of the eighty-eight
titles included in this group in the 1670 catalogue, I shall briefly comment
upon one, Kashōki (Notes to Amuse, 1636) by Nyoraishi (or Joraishi, 1603?–74).
The title is glossed with the word okashiki – the meaning of which ranges
from interesting to outstanding and entertaining – at the end of the fifth
volume. The foreword explains that the title conveys the aim of the text in
one word: to make readers smile and clap their hands. Despite the humorous
posture suggested by the title, Kashōki is mainly a didactic work. It is divided
into 280 independent passages, the majority of which begin with the set
phrase “in the past a certain man said” (mukashi saru hito no ieru wa), thus
reenacting in writing the conditions of an oral narration. Reflecting the
author’s background, most of the passages deal with issues relating to
samurai and rōnin (masterless samurai) and teach about aspects of the life
of this specific class. For example, there is detailed description of the “four ill
behaviors” of a samurai (vol. 1.31), how the fate of a samurai is dictated by his
master (vol. 1.32), how houses for vassals should be built (vol. 2.8), and so
forth. The remainder is a rich and variegated repository of miscellaneous

1
It is also worth mentioning that seventeenth-century popular prose was not limited to the
Kamigata region (the Kyoto-Osaka area), where the washo, kanarui, and sōshi discussed
here were produced. In fact, there were two more parallel productions. First, in Edo
around the 1670s we see the beginning of another form of popular prose, namely small-
size booklets in five folios targeted at children and known as akahon. Second, both in the
Kamigata and in the Kantō regions one-sheet ephemera comparable to Western early
modern broadsheets were circulating as early as the second half of the seventeenth
century.
2
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 11.

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teachings thought to be helpful in everyday situations across social classes.

The reader is reminded that, since human beings tend to become obsessed
with one activity (e.g. drinking, eating, and smoking), focus should be put on
learning (vol. 1.5); advice is offered about what kind of friends one should
have (vol. 1.6); moral instructions are given on how to become rich and, in
doing so, emphasis is once again on the role of education (vol. 1.9); mimicking
the behavior of other social classes is admonished (vol. 1.17); and, in a similar
fashion, features that need to be cherished by each class are identified
(vol. 2.18). Nyoraishi conveys his message by making extensive intertextual
use of Japanese classical works, Chinese texts, and contemporaneous
Confucian works. He adapts these sources in such a way that they become
accessible to seventeenth-century readers. Learned culture is filtered down to
facilitate the education of a vast readership that, potentially, encompasses
semi-literate readers as well. Kashōki was such a hit that a supplementary
commentary was published in 1660 (Asai Ryōi’s Kashōki hyōban) and various
sequels were produced, including Ihara Saikaku’s Shin Kashōki (1688).
The remaining texts in the category of washo also make the dissemination
of knowledge their purpose, whether they relate to Buddhist teachings
(e.g. Daibutsu monogatari), Confucian teachings (e.g. Kōkō monogatari), a
mixture of Buddhist and Confucian teachings (e.g. Kiyomizu monogatari,
Gion monogatari), or promulgation of the new shingaku philosophy. These
texts in all their diversity allow us to map early modern Japanese knowledge
and to understand how knowledge was produced, circulated, and acquired.
Works of this category reveal a variety of “textures”: narrative passages are
interrupted by non-narrative sections, which may be short or long essays
written in an explanatory mode or in the form of dialogue or debate. These
texts, whose common denominator is their didacticism, are an important part
of the landscape of early modern Japanese prose.
In addition to the washo section of the 1670 book-trade catalogue we find
books for dispensing information, namely, manuals of arithmetic and books
for board games, tea ceremony, ikebana, etiquette, and recipes. We then find
a group of texts intended for the edification of women, generally referred to
as nyosho, which includes books of moral precepts, biographies of exemplar
women, and guides to letter writing. These nyosho were promoted by
publishers and booksellers as a specific “publishing genre.”
Another publishing genre that appears in 1670 is called meisho michi no ki
(referred to today as meishoki, or records of famous places), which may be
guidebooks and/or travelogues. The first mature example of this genre is Kyō
warabe, composed by Nakagawa Kiun in 1658. The preface, which is written

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in the first person, gives a fictional frame to the whole work, with an old man
walking through the capital in the company of a ten-year-old boy. The
narrative frame soon gives way to largely descriptive prose: a place name is
followed by a description of topography, the origins of buildings, and an
account of entertainment or economic activities. In some sections a short
poem brings the descriptive passage to an end. Many similar examples were
produced in the seventeenth century, including guidebooks to the main
urban centers, to highways such as the Tōkaidō, and to distant regions
such as Kawachi or Yamato. They vary in the balance between fictional
and non-fictional elements and in narrative and non-narrative elements.
Thus, we find texts with a marked narrative character, such as Tōkaidō
meishoki (written by Asai Ryōi around 1661), as well as those that are not
much more than a list of names, describing topographic peculiarities and
commercial activities, such as Kyō suzume or Edo suzume. In the eighteenth
century, the balance between narrative and non-narrative elements shifts
decisively in favor of the latter, leading to dōchūki (travel guides) and to
meisho-zue (illustrated guidebooks). It is worth noting that Saikaku contrib-
uted to this genre with his Hitometamaboko (1689).
Other categories created in the 1670 catalogue and developed through the
remainder of the Edo period are hanashibon (collections of humorous anec-
dotes and jokes) and Japanese-language Buddhist texts known as kana hōgo.
The main aim of kana hōgo is to popularize Buddhist knowledge. They can
be likened to the religious pamphlets known as “penny godlinesses,” which
were written to disseminate Protestant ideas in early modern Europe. Kana
hōgo include a range of diverse material: medieval as well as newly com-
posed collections of setsuwa, expositions of Buddhist doctrine via dialogue,
either in a fictional or narrative structure, hagiographies of Buddhist priests
like Hōnen, and treatises that explain Buddhist concepts and precepts. For
example, the 1645 Fushinseki sanze monogatari is a guide to Pure Land
Buddhism that could appeal to both literate and semi-literate readers not
only by employing simple language – as if they were meant to be heard – but
also by packaging didacticism within a narrative frame that drew upon
fashionable literary motifs.
A final category that developed in the seventeenth century and was
included in the 1685 catalogue for the first time is that of kōshokubon (books
on love) and rakuji. The latter, rakuji, is a broad category that includes works
that deal with the pleasure quarters, kabuki actors’ critiques (identified as a
sub-category named yarō hyōban), and explicitly erotic works (referred to
nowadays as shunpon). Kōshokubon were launched by Ihara Saikaku’s

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Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Man who Loved Love) and were embraced by
other publishers in the Kamigata area such as Nishimura Ichirōemon.
There were categories in book-trade catalogues that did not group
together books with similar features. There were also books that did not
display the characteristics of one specific publishing genre; they appeared as a
hotchpotch of different textual elements, motifs, themes, and techniques that
were not necessarily associated with any existing genre. There are three main
reasons behind this lack of a clear systematic genre consciousness. First, the
seventeenth century was an age when publishing genres were still in the
process of formation. Second, book production was a commercial enterprise.
In many cases authors were simply writing the kind of books that represented
the latest fads. Third, in many cases there was no “single author” but rather a
sort of “collective author” producing a text often at the behest of a publisher.
A patchwork category that plays a central role in seventeenth-century
Kamigata popular prose is that of the sōshi. In the 1670 catalogue, this
contains a high percentage of tales composed in the Muromachi period
(now known as otogi-zōshi) such as Shuten dōji, Monokusa Tarō, and Saru
Genji zōshi. They were mixed with newly composed narratives, including
Usuyuki monogatari and Urami no suke, which adapted traditional storylines to
new narrative worlds. Muromachi tales were printed, marketed, and con-
sumed as an integral part of seventeenth-century popular prose. In this sense,
printing gave them a second life and a whole new audience.
Among the titles mentioned above, Usuyuki monogatari stands out as an
example of epistolary prose. This marks the beginnings of a genre that was
to expand steadily throughout the Edo period, produced by Saikaku and
many others. Nishikigi (1661), Saikaku’s Yorozu no fumi hōgu (Myriad Scraps
of Letters, 1696) as well as works published by other authors in the
Genroku era and later – e.g. Kōshokubun denju (1688), Shin Usuyuki mono-
gatari (1716), Usu momiji (1722) – represent developments of the same
textual strand.
Sōshi, then, includes all sorts of texts newly produced in the seventeenth
century for a wide readership. Some examples will suffice here. Chōjakyō, first
published in movable type in 1627 and then reprinted with variants and
additions right up to 1847, was a guide on how to become rich that was
followed by similar works such as Saikaku’s Nippon eitaigura (Japan’s Eternal
Storehouse, 1688). Yakushi tsuya monogatari (1643) is an account of the famine
that struck the whole of Japan in 1642 and forms part of a vast literature on
disasters that includes not only the seventeenth-century Musashi abumi (1661)

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and Kanameishi (1662), but also works after Saikaku such as the renowned
Ansei kenmonshi (1856).
How should Saikaku be seen in this context? No one can deny that he
was an extremely gifted writer who was able to fully exploit the poetic
potentialities of the language and, by doing so, to appropriate existing
genres. It should also be noted that he was one of the very first writers to
emerge as an author in his own right, one who wrote in a unique style and
produced texts that were recognizably his own. One major innovation by
Saikaku was the publication of the first example of a new genre, namely
the kōshokubon.
In summary, what were the characteristics of seventeenth-century popular
prose? First, we have noted the use of a variety of textures in a single text.
Non-narrative and non-fictional elements can appear within fictional or non-
fictional narration. A work like Genroku Taiheiki (1702) by Miyako no Nishiki,
for example, offers lengthy non-narrative expositions about the contempor-
ary book market in the same vein as the didactic literature of the previous
century within a narrative of two booksellers traveling on a boat. Second,
whether narrative or non-narrative, or a mixture of the two, these texts strive
to appeal to a vast readership by addressing issues relevant to contemporary
society.
Third, the same desire for wide appeal led to the adoption of a user-friendly
layout that would attract semi-literate as well as more literate readers. Unlike
later Edo-based kusa-zōshi, seventeenth-century Kamigata printed books did
not share a common physical layout. Rather, they adapted themselves to the
possibilities of woodblock printing. In this process, illustrations emerged as a
prominent feature. Woodcut pictures attracted those on the fringes of
literacy and their inclusion allowed the book to captivate the imagination
of a large public. The book format also changed, moving from the large ōhon
format to smaller, easier to handle, and cheaper formats (hanshibon, kohon,
yokobon). The same is true of the writing styles. These texts were written in
the vernacular language as opposed to learned classical Chinese. But written
Japanese has never been restricted to the phonetic syllabary. On the contrary,
many Chinese characters were used in seventeenth-century popular prose,
but they were made accessible through the use of furigana glosses. This was
employed by Saikaku in all his prose works and later on in the Hachimonjiya
books.
Fourth, rewriting was a key textual strategy. This includes a vast range of
intertextual strategies involving translation (extralingual and intralingual),
parody, allusion, quotation, pastiche and travesty. As the Osaka bookseller

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who appears in Genroku taiheiki reminds us, “to create the new out of the old
is the behavior of all famous writers.”3 And, more than anything else,
rewriting aimed to adapt and domesticate items that belonged to the learned
culture. The minimal parody of Ise monogatari that we find in Nise monogatari,
for example, exploits a powerful textual mechanism to appropriate courtly
culture to the realm of the new chōnin culture.

3
Genroku Taiheiki, first volume, 17v–18r; facsimile edition, 446–7.

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The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa
Buson, and Kobayashi Issa
haruo shirane

The genre of haikai, originally an abbreviation for the term haikai no renga
(popular linked verse), can be traced as far back as the Heian period and
even to the Man’yōshū, to a genre called haikaika, or haikai-esque (playful)
waka, which usually created humor through verbal puns and unorthodox
treatment of poetic topics within the classical thirty-one-syllable poetic
form. Haikai as a new independent genre, a linked verse form beginning
with the seventeen-syllable hokku (opening verse), emerged in the late
medieval period as a counterpart to renga (orthodox or classical linked
verse), which eventually superseded waka in popularity. Haikai linked
verse grew popular in the late medieval age of gekokujō (rising up from
beneath), when established cultural icons, from poetic topics to Buddhas,
became the butt of humor, parody, and satire. Haikai as a popular genre
fully came into its own in the Edo period, moving from a state of
anonymity (poets rarely put their names to haikai in the Muromachi
period) to a multifaceted genre that had a broad impact on many other
cultural forms.
Waka, the thirty-one-syllable classical poem, generally excluded all forms
of language not found in the refined, aristocratic diction of the Heian
classics. The same restrictions applied to renga, which continued the
classical tradition into the late medieval period. By contrast, late medieval
haikai freely used haigon (haikai words) – vernacular Japanese, Chinese,
Buddhist terms, slang, common sayings – in compositions that challenged,
inverted, or otherwise subverted classical poetry and often were scatologi-
cal, bawdy, or corporeal. The Inu tsukubashū (Mongrel Tsukuba Collection,
1532), one of the earliest anthologies of haikai, begins with:
Kasumi no koromo A robe of mist
suso wa nurekeri soaked at the hem

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The tsukeku (added verse) composed by Yamazaki Sōkan, one of the pioneers
of haikai and thought to be the editor of the Mongrel Tsukuba Collection, is
Sahohime no Princess Saho
haru tachinagara with the coming of spring
shito o shite stands pissing
It was a convention in classical poetry that Sahohime, the beautiful goddess
of spring, stands in the midst of a spring mist, which becomes her robe. The
added verse, which uses the colloquial phrase shito o su (to piss), parodies that
classical convention by having the princess urinate while standing, as com-
moner women did in those days. Tatsu is a homonym that means both “to
stand” and “to begin” (marking the coming of spring), thus fusing two
sociocultural worlds.
Linked verses such as those found in the Mongrel Tsukuba Collection
were considered light entertainment, usually composed by Muromachi
period renga poets between more serious sessions of classical linked
verse. By the first half of the seventeenth century, however, the produc-
tion and function of haikai had radically changed, becoming one of the
new popular genres accessible to a broad community of participants.
Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), the founder of the Teimon school of
haikai, was a noted scholar, waka poet, and teacher of classical literature.
Teitoku and his disciples wanted haikai to be accessible to a wide but not
necessarily highly educated audience, and they wanted to make haikai a
respectable part of the poetic tradition. Their solution was to concentrate
on using “haikai words,” while rejecting or tempering the kind of ribald,
irreverent humor and language found in earlier haikai, which they
regarded as unseemly and vulgar. The Teimon school continued the
lexical play and parody but restricted the haikai diction to Chinese
words (kango) and acceptable vernacular words. The Shinzō Inu
tsukubashū (New Mongrel Tsukuba Collection, 1643), a haikai anthology
edited by Teitoku, presented Teitoku‘s response to the “robe of mist”
poem cited earlier:
Kasumi no koromo A robe of mist
suso wa nurekeri soaked at the hem
Tennin ya Heavenly creatures
amakudaru rashi descending it seems –
haru no umi the sea of spring

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Except for the haikai word tennin (heavenly creatures), a Chinese compound,
the content of the added verse, which unexpectedly replaces the goddess of
spring with the word tennin, has the kind of elegance found in classical renga.
The Enokoshū (Puppy Collection, 1633), edited by Teitoku‘s disciples,
contains the following hokku by Teitoku under the topic of New Year’s
Day (Ganjitsu):
Kasumi sae Even the spring mist
madara ni tatsu ya rises in spots and patches –
tora no toshi Year of the Tiger
Teitoku here links “spring mist” (kasumi), a classical word, to “tiger” (tora), a
haikai word, through two puns: madara ni (in spots and patches), associated
with both mist and tiger, and tatsu (to stand, rise, begin). In Teimon fashion,
the gap between the elegant classical image (spring mist) and the contem-
porary vernacular is humorously bridged through lexical associations.
The Danrin school of haikai, which became popular in the 1670s and
1680s, used many of the techniques found in Teimon haikai: engo (word
association), kakekotoba (homophonic wordplay), parody, and mitate
(visual comparisons). However, unlike the haikai of the Teimon school,
which was based in Kyoto, the center of aristocratic culture, and evoked
the classical tradition, Danrin haikai developed in Osaka, the new center
of commerce and Ihara Saikaku’s home, where a society of increasingly
wealthy and powerful urban commoners was generating its own culture.
If Teitoku tried to impose order on linked verse, Nishiyama Sōin
(1605–82), the founder of Danrin haikai and a resident of Osaka, stressed
freedom of form and movement, linking verses without excessive con-
cern for rules or precedent. Danrin’s iconoclastic character included the
occasional use of hypermetric syllables (ji-amari) – surpassing the formal
limit of seventeen – which were usually added to the last five syllables of
the hokku. In the process Danrin poets explored myriad aspects of
contemporary culture, including the pleasure quarters and kabuki thea-
ter. Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), generally considered the first major prose
fiction writer of the Edo period, began as a Danrin haikai poet and later
transmuted his long solo compositions of linked verse into the poetic
prose that was to become the hallmark of his early fiction.
Danrin poets deliberately heightened the tension between haikai
words and classical diction, believing that the greater the collision, the
greater the haikai effect. Indōshū (Teachings Collection, 1684), a Danrin
haikai handbook edited by Nakamura Saikoku (1647–95), a merchant from

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Bungo (in Kyushu) and a disciple of Saikaku, uses the following verse as
an example of the Danrin method:
Mine no hana Making sea lions and whales
no nami ni ashika swim in the cherry blossom waves
kujira o oyogase on the peak
This hokku links cherry blossoms – which were closely associated with waves
and mountain peaks in classical poetry – with sea lions (ashika) and whales
(kujira), two haikai words. The poem comically deconstructs a familiar
classical convention, “the waves of cherry blossoms,” by using this figurative
cliché in its literal meaning as the “waves of water” in which sea lions and
whales swim. The resulting disjunction, in which two different socially
inscribed languages inhabit the same word, produced not only haikai
humor but what Itchū (1639– 1711), a Danrin polemicist, referred to as gūgen
(allegory), making possible what is not possible.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), who participated in both the Teimon and the
Danrin schools, became the most influential haikai poet of the late seventeenth
century. Although Bashō’s grandfather and great-grandfather had belonged to
the samurai class, by Bashō’s time the family had fallen so low that they had
become farmers with only tenuous ties to the samurai class. In the spring of
1672, at the age of twenty-eight, Bashō moved to Edo to establish himself as a
haikai master who could charge fees for his services. There he came under the
influence of Nishiyama Sōin, with whom he composed poetry in 1675. By the
mid 1670s, Bashō had attracted the nucleus of his disciples and patrons – notably
Kikaku, Ransetsu, Sanpū, and Ranran – who would play a major role in the
formation of what later came to be known as the Bashō circle (Shōmon). In the
winter of 1680, Bashō left Edo and retreated to Fukagawa, on the banks of the
Sumida River. The move signaled that he had also left behind urban haikai,
which by then had become highly commercialized, and over the next four years
he wrote in the so-called “Chinese style,” creating the persona of a recluse poet
who was opposed to the materialism and social ambitions of the new urban
culture. One of Bashō’s literary achievements was fusing the earlier recluse poet
tradition established by waka and kanshi poets like Saigyō, Sōgi, and Ishikawa
Jōzan with the new commoner genre of haikai. He took his poetic name from
the bashō plant, or Japanese plantain, whose large leaves sometimes tear in the
wind, which represented the fragility of the recluse-sojourner’s life.
The following hokku by Bashō reflects the careful balance and tension
between contemporary and traditional, vernacular and classical, that he
achieved in his mature period.

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Lodging for the Night at Akashi:

Takotsubo ya Octopus traps –

hakanaki yume o fleeting dreams
natsu no tsuki under the summer moon
Bashō composed this poem, which appears in Backpack Notes (Oi no kobumi,
1709), in the Fourth Month of 1688. The octopus traps were lowered in the
afternoon and raised the next morning, after the octopus had crawled
inside. The octopuses trapped in the jars – and implicitly the troops of the
Heike clan who were massacred on the shores of Akashi at the end of the
twelfth century and whose ghosts appear before the traveler in Backpack
Notes – have “fleeting dreams,” not knowing that they are about to be
harvested. Bashō juxtaposes the “summer moon” (natsu no tsuki), which the
classical tradition deemed to be as brief as the summer night and thus
associated with ephemerality, and the “octopus traps” (takotsubo), a verna-
cular word, giving new life to the theme of impermanence. The poem
deftly blends humor with pathos.
Linked verse sequences began with a seventeen-syllable (5/7/5) hokku
(opening verse) to which was added a fourteen-syllable (7/7) second verse
(wakiku), which was capped in turn by a seventeen-syllable (5/7/5) third
verse (daisanku), and so forth, until a sequence of thirty-six, forty-four, fifty,
one hundred, or a thousand verses was completed. Though linked verse
could be composed by a single individual, as a solo composition (dokugin), it
was usually a communal activity in which two or more participants took
turns linking to create a sequence. Each added verse (tsukeku) was joined to
the previous verse (maeku) to form a new poetic microcosm, while pushing
off from the one created by the combination of the previous verse and the
penultimate verse (uchikoshi). The following sequence (Nos. 22, 23, 24)
appears in a kasen (thirty-six-verse sequence) called Ko no moto ni (Beneath
the Cherry Trees) in Hisago (Gourd, 1690), a Bashō-school haikai anthology.
Kumano mitaki to “I want to see Kumano,”
nakitamahikeri she wept.
Bashō
Tatsukayumi Bow in hand,
Ki no sekimori ga the barrier guard at Ki
katakuna ni unyielding
Chinseki

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Sake de hagetaru The bald head –

atama naruran probably too much drinking
Kyokusui
The first verse uses an honorific verb to suggest the high status of the traveler
(presumably a woman) who is weeping because she is anxious to visit
Kumano, a popular site for pilgrimages in the Heian and medieval periods.
The next verse by Chinseki merges with the previous verse by Bashō to
reveal that the traveler is weeping because a guard with a hand-held bow is
refusing to let her pass through the barrier at Ki province. The third verse,
which pushes off from Bashō’s verse and combines with Chinseki’s verse,
humorously transforms the barrier guard into a tippler, whose head has
grown bald, or so it appears, from excessive drinking. Here the aristocratic,
seemingly somber world of the first two verses is unexpectedly transformed
into the casually cynical, commoner world of the last two verses. The interest
of linked verse is in this ongoing process of decontextualizing and recontex-
tualizing, in the competition to add a good verse to the sequence, and in the
constant movement from one world to another.
Modern readers of lyric poetry tend to read monologically, either in an
expressive, emotive mode, or in a descriptive, mimetic mode, as a reflection
of the external world as perceived by the speaker. Such modes of reading
cannot accommodate the crucial fact that much Japanese poetry, particularly
in the premodern or early modern period, was composed dialogically to fulfill
social or ritual functions such as complimenting a host, expressing gratitude,
bidding farewell, making an offering to the land, or consoling the spirits of the
dead. A good example is the following hokku by Bashō:
Shiragiku no Gazing intently
me ni tatete miru at the white chrysanthemums –
chiri mo nashi not a speck of dust
The speaker is viewing white chrysanthemums and seeing that they are
absolutely unsoiled. Bashō originally composed this poem after arriving as
a guest at the house of Madame Sono, one of his disciples, and in this context
the poem functions as a greeting and a compliment to the hostess. The poem
employs the white chrysanthemums as metaphor for the hostess, implying
“this is a beautiful house, with a beautiful host, just like an elegant white
chrysanthemum, and there’s not a speck of dust here. You and the house are
perfect.”

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The hokku required a kigo (seasonal word), an encoded sign that indicated
a specific season and had precise poetic associations (the autumn wind, for
example, suggesting loneliness or desolation), and a kireji (cutting word),
which divided the hokku into two parts, usually after the first or second line.
The cutting word typically causes the two parts to resonate, forcing the
reader to find some internal connection, as in this noted hokku by Bashō,
which first appeared in Azuma nikki (Eastern Diary), a collection of haikai
poetry in 1681.
Kareeda ni On a withered branch
karasu no tomaritaru ya crows come to rest –
aki no kure evening in autumn
The two parts of the hokku – the withered branch and autumn evening – can
be read both as a single scene, as in a kokoro-zuke (content link), which links
two consecutive verses by content, with crows settling on a withered branch
in autumn evening. The same hokku can be read as a nioi-zuke (fragrant link)
in which the two parts are linked only by connotation. In Azuma nikki, this
hokku is preceded by a headnote, “On Evening in Autumn,” a classical waka
topic. In that context, the second part poses the question: “What represents
the essence of evening in autumn?” The first half answers with “A crow or
crows on a withered branch,” which was closely associated with a Chinese
ink-painting topic.
The hokku was usually recited and recorded on a kaishi, or pocket paper.
Then, if the poem was noteworthy, it was copied in proper calligraphic form
on a tanzaku card or a more elaborate shikishi (colored, decorated paper). The
hokku could also be expanded into a haibun, a short vignette that combined
hokku and poetic prose, or presented calligraphically as part of a haiga text/
painting combination. The medium of haiga painting, light ink wash with
spare accents, afforded significant open space for the viewer’s imagination.
The material form of the tanzaku, haibun, or haiga served important social
functions. The poet as guest usually wrote something and gave it to the host
as a present and token of appreciation. In fact, Bashō depended on the
generosity of his hosts for a living, and he literally paid his patrons in the
form of kaishi, tanzaku, shikishi, haibun, and haiga. In one case, Bashō even
sent an elaborate picture scroll (emaki) of a journey to the main host of his trip
to the Kansai-Nagoya region.
The hokku, haikai sequence, or the haibun could be reproduced as printed
text in haikai collections or in various kinds of diaries or narratives. Bashō’s
travel diaries were often created after the fact, weaving together individual

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tanzaku and haibun composed during the journey. With the rise of printing
in the mid seventeenth century, hokku collections, haikai anthologies, and
travel diaries were often published for wider audiences. In the process, Bashō
often revised his hokku, the headnotes, and the linked verse sequences
themselves, sometimes even changing the names of the participants, either
to improve the texts or to make them more comprehensible to someone who
was not a participant or witness to the event.
One important objective of haikai collections was to commemorate and
advertise the latest achievements of a particular poetic school or circle of
poets. For example, Nozarashi kikō (Skeleton in the Fields, 1685–87), one of
Bashō’s early travel diaries, celebrates Bashō’s encounter with the Owari
(Aichi/Nagoya) group and the establishment of the Bashō style, especially
the transition from the turgid Chinese style of the early 1680s to the relaxed,
quasi-renga style of the mid to late 1680s. In a similar fashion, Oku no
hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1694), Bashō’s most noted
literary travel diary, commemorates the emergence of a new configuration
of disciples centered in Yamagata, Kaga, Ōmi, and Edo. Haikai were also
composed, collected, and printed as tsuizen-shū, or memorial service collec-
tions, to honor a dead poet and serve as an offering to the spirit of the
deceased on the anniversary of his or her death.
Haikai was to evolve significantly after the passing of Bashō and his school.
One major successor was Yosa Buson (1716–83), a noted painter, literatus, and
haikai poet, who was born in Settsu province in the farming village of Kema
(in present-day Osaka). At around the age of twenty, Buson moved to Edo
and became a disciple of Hayano Hajin (1676–1742), a haikai poet who had
established the Yahantei circle in Nihonbashi. Hajin had been a student of
Kikaku, a disciple of Bashō and the founder of the Edo-za school to which
Buson later had close ties. In 1751 Buson moved to Kyoto and then shortly
thereafter, in 1754, to Tango province (north of the city of Kyoto), where he
spent the next three years practicing bunjinga (literati painting), also known as
nanga (Southern-style painting), and produced both historical and landscape
paintings. In 1757, he returned to Kyoto, married, and changed his family
name from Taniguchi to Yosa, the area from which his mother had come. By
the 1760s, his talent as a bunjin painter had gained recognition, and he
eventually became, along with Ike Taiga, one of most famous bunjin painters
of the Edo period.
The period in which Buson was active – from the 1750s to the 1780s – was
the heyday of the bunjin ideal, and his contemporaries included Hiraga
Gennai (1728–80), Takebe Ayatari (1719–74), Tsuga Teishō (1718?–94?), Ueda

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Akinari (1734–1809), and Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823). Of these writer-intellectuals,

only Buson was closely associated with the Bashō haikai revival, which took
place in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The result, for Buson, was a
significant cross-fertilization between the kanshi literati tradition and haikai –
that is, between Chinese and Japanese artistic cultures. Unlike Bashō, who
advocated “awakening to the high, returning to the low” (kōga kizoku) and
sought “lightness” (karumi) or a poetics of everyday life, Buson advocated
“departing from the common or everyday” (rizoku) in exploration of other
worlds through Chinese literature and painting as well as Japanese classics,
wandering freely in a world of elegance and imagination that he found
superior to the mundane world of lived experience. The difference between
Bashō’s “return” to the low, which implied an engagement with everyday
life, and Buson’s “departure,” which implied an escape from contemporary
society, reflects a fundamental difference between the culture of the Genroku
era and the attitude of many late eighteenth-century intellectuals.
The highly intertextual nature of a number of Buson’s poems is demon-
strated very clearly in the following hokku.
Yanagi chiri Willow leaves fallen,
shimizu kare ishi the clear stream gone –
tokorodokoro stones here and there
This hokku was composed around 1743 when Buson visited Tōhoku, the
northeast region of Honshū. It is both a description of a natural scene and a
haikai variation on a famous classical poem by Saigyō (1118–90): “By the side
of the road, alongside a stream of clear water, in the shade of a willow tree, I
paused for what I thought would be just a moment” (Shinkokinshū, Summer,
no. 262). Matsuo Bashō wrote about the same willow tree in his Oku no
hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North): “A whole field of rice seedlings
planted – I part from the willow” (ta ichimai uete tachisaru yanagi kana).
Having come to the place where Saigyō had written this poem, Bashō relives
those emotions, and before he knows it, a whole field of rice has been
planted. In contrast to Bashō’s poem, which recaptures the past, Buson’s
poem is implicitly about loss and the passage of time, contrasting the situa-
tion now, in autumn, when the stream has dried up and the willow leaves
have fallen, with the past, when the clear stream beckoned to Saigyō and the
willow tree gave him, as it did Bashō, shelter from the hot summer sun.
The following is an example of Buson’s “historical” haikai, an important
feature of his poetry. These are set in the distant past, either historical or
literary, as in this hokku published in Haikai shinsen in 1773.

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Komabune no The Korean ship

yorade sugiyuku not stopping, passing back
kusumi kana into the mist
Komabune were the large Korean ships that sailed to Japan in the ancient
period, bringing cargo and precious goods from the continent, a practice that
had long been discontinued by Buson’s time. Viewed from the land, the
Korean ship appears to be heading for the port but then gradually disappears
into the “mist” (kasumi), a seasonal word for spring. The mist covers the
water, blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the present
and the past. The key middle line, “not stopping, passing back” (yorade
sugiyuku), suggests a long passage of time, a sense of growing of anticipation,
and then of disappointment.
In contrast to Bashō, whose poetry is solidly grounded in his everyday,
contemporary world, Buson wrote not only historical hokku but a number of
“fantastic” hokku, such as this example, composed in 1777.
Kindachi ni The fox disguised
kitsune baketari as a dashing prince –
yoi no haru spring evening
Yoi no haru is a warm, hazy spring evening, evocative of romantic or
mysterious things, a mood matched by the mysterious behavior of the fox.
Buson was fascinated by the strange nocturnal movements of foxes and
badgers, as evident in his many verses on this topic and in his stories in
New Flower Gathering (Shinhanatsumi, Published 1797).
Last but not least, it should be noted that one of the most outstanding
characteristics of Buson’s hokku are their musical quality, as in this poem
published in 1762.
Haru no umi The spring sea –
hinemosu notari all day long the waves
notari kana rising and falling, rising and falling
The “spring sea” (haru no umi) suggests a relatively calm, open surface. The
light waves gently rise and fall, either out at sea or against the shore. The
onomatopoeic phrase notari notari suggests a gentle swelling and subsiding,
whereas the phrase hinemosu (all day long) implies a sense of time stretching
out forever.
In the early nineteenth century, after Buson and his successors had died,
haikai continued to be popular. The most talented haikai poet of this age was
Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), whose main interest was in the contemporary and

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 The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa

quotidian, and who focused on the hokku rather than on linked verse. Issa,
born Kobayashi Yatarō, was the first son of a middle-class farmer in
Kashiwabara, at the northern tip of Shinano Province (Nagano), near the
Japan Sea, a region referred to as the Snow Country (yukiguni). Unwelcomed
by his stepmother, Issa left home in 1777 when he was fourteen and went to
Edo, where he struggled as an apprentice-servant. Around 1787, he began
studying haikai with Nirokuan Chikua (1710–90) and other poets of the haikai
Katsushika group, which was part of a larger Bashō revival, and he adopted
the haikai pen-name Issa (Cup of Tea). In 1792, he began a six-year journey
through the Kyoto-Osaka region, Shikoku, and Kyūshū, after which he went
back to Edo and took over Chikua’s school.
Issa is considered a highly unorthodox haikai poet. He was exposed to the
different currents of haikai prevailing at that time: first, the Bashō-revival
style of the Katsushika school, then the comic style of the Danrin school in
Osaka, and finally the “rural (inaka) style,” characterized by colloquial lan-
guage and dialect. This style, which foregrounds the use of provincial topics,
came into prominence in Edo in the first two decades of the nineteenth
century. In contrast to the Edo haikai poets, for whom the provincial style
was a matter of fashion, Issa wrote from experience and with striking
individuality, reflecting both his roots in a provincial farming village and
his uncertain life in the city. The “Issa style” that he developed is noted for its
dynamic use of colloquial language and for its fresh perspective, that of
someone looking at city life as an outsider. His poetry tends to straddle the
border between the seventeen-syllable senryū (satiric haiku), with its earthy
diction and social critique, and the emphasis on nature and the seasons of
more conservative haikai. In this sense, Issa reacted strongly against the
tendency of earlier haikai poets (such as Buson) to write on fixed topics. He
is particularly well known for his sympathy for animals, insects, and small
creatures; his use of personification; his humor; and the autobiographical
character of his writing and poetry, especially with regard to his position as an
oppressed stepson and as a person consumed by poverty and misfortune.
Issa created what one might call a “poetry of everyday life.” Recently, the
autobiographical authenticity of his writings has been questioned, as some
critics believe that they contain significant fictional elements, but there is no
doubt that he created a gripping poetic persona.
Furusato ya My old home –
yoru mo sawaru mo wherever I turn, whatever I touch,
ibara no hana thorned roses

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The flower of the thorn bush (ibara no hana), a seasonal word for early
summer, is associated with nostalgia, much like the “old home” (furusato),
but instead of enjoying the fond memories of the past, Issa is wounded
everywhere he turns by the thorns. According to his Seventh Diary
(Shichiban nikki, 1810–18), which includes this poem, in the Fifth Month of
1810 Issa traveled from Edo to his hometown of Kashiwabara, where he
unsuccessfully attempted to obtain from the mayor the will left by his
deceased father. The cold reception given him by the mayor, his stepmother,
stepbrother, and others in his hometown provides the backdrop for the
poem.
Issa’s most famous poem reflects his poetic persona as the perpetual
underdog as well as his sympathy for the weak and oppressed.
Yasegaeru Skinny frog,
makeru na Issa ga don’t give up the fight!
kore ni ari Issa is here!
Issa is here witness to a frog battle. In the spring, during their mating season,
male frogs gather to fight over a single female frog. “Don’t give up!” (makeru
na) is a military phrase used by a commander to urge on his troops. In this
context, the poet is calling out encouragement to a male frog who appears to
be losing the battle. The poem has been interpreted as showing Issa’s
sympathy for small, weak, and vulnerable creatures (much like himself). It
also may mean that Issa, single and without a family for most of his life, is
encouraging himself with regard to his marital prospects.

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 42
Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki: the
literature of urban townspeople
paul schalow

Ihara (or Ibara) Saikaku (1642–93) and Ejima Kiseki (1666–1735) were active on
the literary scene during the decades-long first flowering of urban townsman
(chōnin) culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when
Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns. They are widely acknowledged
as masters of the so-called ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world) genre,
which Saikaku pioneered and which Kiseki popularized for the next genera-
tion. Their books proved to be phenomenally popular with an emerging
townsman readership for two main reasons: they allowed vicarious access to
trend-setting courtesans, actors, and patrons of the demimonde in the urban
theaters and pleasure quarters (yūkaku) of the day, and they simultaneously
affirmed the economic power of the merchant class.
Both authors were born into wealthy merchant families. Saikaku was
raised in Naniwa, the heart of the commercial city of Osaka; Kiseki came
from an old family of confectioners in the capital of Kyoto. Under the
Tokugawa shoguns, artisans and merchants who made up the townsman
class occupied the bottom rung of the Confucian social hierarchy, after
warriors and farmers, based on the perceived value of their contributions
to society. But Saikaku’s merchant-class consciousness transcended the offi-
cial orthodoxy to an extent. He suggests the essential equality of all people in
the introduction to Buke giri monogatari (Tales of Samurai Honor; Osaka,
Kyoto, and Edo, 1688).
The heart of one man is the same heart found in all mankind; a long sword in
his sash makes a man a warrior, a ceremonial cap on his head makes him a
Shinto priest, wearing black robes makes him a monk, wielding a hoe makes
him a farmer, using a carpenter’s adze makes him a craftsman, calculating on
an abacus makes him a merchant; but in no way do they differ from each
other in their hearts.

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Saikaku and Kiseki apparently received instruction in haikai poetry com-

position early in life. It was the fashion in the period for the wealthiest
merchant households to educate themselves and their children in the literary
arts, and haikai was the preferred subject of study. This was in part because
linked-verse composition was an activity that strengthened social bonds
among members of the merchant class and was useful in establishing and
maintaining business relations.

Ihara Saikaku
Little is known about Saikaku’s origins and early years. Some scholars have
argued that he was descended from warriors in service to the Takeda clan,
based on the “narrow circle and flower-diamond” (hosowa ni hanabishi) family
crest that appears on his robes in a rare portrait painted by friend and fellow
poet Haga Isshō (1643–1707). Others have suggested that Saikaku took the
name Ihara (or Ibara) from his maternal side of the family, which likely traced
its lineage to swordsmiths working in Ibara in the province of Bitchū, to the
west of Osaka. This is supported by the fact that he was raised in the
Yariyamachi (Spearsmith Block) of Osaka, in the shadow of the great Osaka
castle, where metalworkers and merchants dealing in their wares dwelled.
One of the few reliable accounts about Saikaku is an entry in Kenmon Dansō
(1738), a collection of essays written by Itō Baiu (1683–1745) in which he
recorded various recollections of his father, the Confucian thinker and
educator Itō Jinsai (1627–1705). Baiu is the only source that informs us of
Saikaku’s real name, Hirayama Tōgo. Baiu also states that Saikaku lost his
wife when he was thirty-three years old and she was twenty-four, leaving him
to raise a blind daughter alone. The death of his wife inspired him to create
perhaps the most personal of his works, Dokugin ichinichi senku (A Thousand
Verses Composed Alone in a Single Day; Osaka, 1675). The text reveals
Saikaku using his poetic arts as a heartfelt prayer for the peaceful repose of
his dead wife’s soul, or even as a figurative vehicle to transport her soul to the
afterlife. In fact, scholars have argued that the composition of this solo
sequence marked the beginning of his life as a writer. With his wife’s passing,
he shaved his head in the style of a monk, an act that signified symbolic death,
and turned over the day-to-day running of the family business to a steward.
Thereafter, Baiu states, Saikaku devoted himself to travel and writing as the
spirit moved him.
Saikaku was active as an amateur instructor (“marker,” or tenja) of haikai
from the age of twenty-one, using the moniker of Kakuei (“Crane Eternal”),

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but he had not yet determined to pursue haikai professionally. The defining
influence that spurred him to contemplate retiring from running the family
business and launching a serious literary career was his encounter with the
noted haikai master Nishiyama Sōin (1605–82), founder of the Danrin school.
Kakuei was drawn to Sōin’s iconoclastic style, which was more open to
incorporating the diction and imagery of contemporary, urban life into linked
verse than the Teimon school of Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653) in which he
had been trained earlier. In 1673, he received permission to use the character
nishi (“west”) from his mentor Sōin’s name to devise the new literary name,
Saikaku (“Western Crane”), by which we know him today. After his wife’s
death two years later, Saikaku’s way forward was clear: he would turn from
business and devote himself instead to his literary craft.
For the next decade, Saikaku gradually cultivated a growing group of
fellow poets and disciples who joined him in haikai composition. In these
years, he edited at least five volumes of verses for publication, but his own
verses appeared only sporadically in the haikai collections of other Danrin
poets. In one example from Haikai sanga no tsu (1682), Saikaku’s verse
expresses the harsh realities of life for merchants, who must settle all of
their accounts by the end of the year or risk insolvency: Ōmisoka sadame naki
yo no sadame kana (“New Year’s Eve; a certainty in an uncertain world”).
In this period, Saikaku also began actively asserting his iconoclastic “Dutch
school” (Oranda ryū) haikai style in progressively more strenuous feats of solo
performance known as yakazu (“Arrow Counting”) competitions, such as the
1,600-verse Saikaku haikai ōkukazu (1677) and the 1,000-verse Tobiume senku
(1679). In the solo performance that was published as Saikaku ōyakazu (1681),
he produced 4,000 verses in a single day and night, an unheard of number to
that point, but this figure was soon surpassed by one of his Danrin rivals,
Ōyodo Michikaze (1639–1707). Saikaku responded in 1684 with a solo perfor-
mance at Sumiyoshi Shrine that resulted in an astonishing 23,500 verses
composed in a single day and night, a pace of recitation too fast even to
record. The record he established at Sumiyoshi Shrine proved Saikaku’s
complete dominance in the genre of yakazu haikai and effectively ended
the “Arrow Counting” fad in the Danrin school.
It also marked the departure of Saikaku from active participation in haikai
circles in favor of prose writing. Late in 1682, the year of Sōin’s death, Saikaku
had privately published what he seems to have thought of as a modest book,
titled Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Man who Loved Love). Contrary to his
expectation, The Man who Loved Love sold briskly and went through a
surprising three pressings. Another more established publisher, the Akitaya,

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subsequently bought the rights to the book and produced a second and then
third edition of it with continued brisk sales. Finally, in 1684, a publisher in
Edo came out with a deluxe edition illustrated by none other than Hishikawa
Moronobu (1618–94), the preeminent ukiyo-e artist of the day, which also
went through three editions. The book would change both Saikaku’s career
and the history of Japanese literature.
What accounted for the phenomenal success of The Man who Loved Love? It
was a collection of fifty-four stories, loosely modeled on the classic Tale of
Genji’s fifty-four chapters, that described the coming of age and sexual
escapades of its protagonist, Yonosuke (“man of the world”), filled with
twists and turns of fate that were often hilarious. Readers identified with
the financial travails of Yonosuke and discovered in the story of his love-life a
joie de vivre that they found thoroughly appealing. The so-called kana-zōshi
genre, which dominated the market in the seventeenth century, generally
presented stories derived from the classics that were written in an easy to
read vernacular. The Man who Loved Love represented a dramatic departure
from previous kana-zōshi in terms of the contemporary immediacy of its
content and the stylish flair of its haikai-inspired prose (haibun). As it turned
out, the new style captured the popular imagination and dominated Saikaku’s
writings for the rest of his life.
Saikaku’s oeuvre of ukiyo-zōshi is often divided into kōshoku-mono (books
on love), buke-mono (books on warrior life), and finally chōnin-mono (books on
merchant life). The books on love, a new genre that Saikaku developed, were
inaugurated by the story of Yonosuke in The Man who Loved Love published in
1682. Saikaku capitalized on its success and within two years had produced a
sequel consisting of stories about courtesans in pleasure quarters throughout
the land and using the figure of Yonosuke’s son, Yoden, as a framing device. It
was titled Shoen ōkagami (The Great Mirror of Beauties, 1684), but it was
popularly known by its subtitle Kōshoku nidai otoko (Another Man who Loved
Love).
Saikaku’s next book on love was Wankyū isse no monogatari (The Tale of
Wankyū I; Osaka, 1685), detailing the legendary career of an Osaka merchant
named Wanya Kyūzaemon. In two volumes of six stories each, Saikaku
traced first the extravagant spending habits of his hero in pursuit of court-
esans in the pleasure quarter (vol. 1), and then the ultimate cost of that
extravagance, which resulted in the hero’s bankruptcy and death by drown-
ing (vol. 2). The sobering focus on financial and emotional consequences
represented a departure from the rollicking, floating mood of Saikaku’s first
two books on love.

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Saikaku then wrote Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women who Loved Love;
Osaka and Edo, 1686), consisting of five short stories that, similarly to The Tale
of Wankyū, depicted harsh consequences for four of the five heroines, who
paid with their lives for transgressing the law in order to be with the man they
loved. The final heroine, however, is spared death (collections of stories
needed to end felicitously); hers is a fantasy ending as she and her lover
receive an inheritance that allows them to live out their days in luxury. In the
same year, Saikaku published Kōshoku ichidai onna (The Woman who Loved
Love; Osaka, 1686), which depicted the downward trajectory of the life of a
beautiful woman, beginning in her youth as a top-ranked courtesan in the
pleasure quarter and ending as a common street-walker in her old age. The
book’s theme suggested the influence of zange-mono, or Buddhist confessional
discourses, in which believers described the personal tragedies that opened
their eyes to the delusion of attachment and brought them to faith in the
Buddha’s teachings. The following year, Nanshoku ōkagami (The Great Mirror
of Male Love; Osaka and Kyoto, 1687) was published. It was a pivotal work
between books on love and books on warrior life, possessing aspects of both.
As in Five Women who Loved Love, most of the stories concluded with the death
of the male youth as he paid the ultimate price to show his honor, devotion,
or passion for the man he loved.
A posthumous publication in the category of books on love, edited by
Saikaku’s disciple Hōjō Dansui (1663–1711), was titled Saikaku okimiyage
(Saikaku’s Parting Gift; Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, 1693), and represented the
last collection of stories on what might be termed Saikaku’s favorite and
defining subject, sexual love.
Compared to Saikaku’s twelve titles on love, the books on warriors total
only three: Budō denrai ki (Record of the Transmission of the Way of the
Warrior; Osaka and Edo, 1687), Buke giri monogatari, and Shin Kashōki (The
New Kashōki; Osaka and Edo, 1688). These texts may have appealed to
Saikaku’s merchant-class readership, who would likely have shown keen
interest in stories that gave them insight into the thoughts and motives of
their social superiors in the warrior class, but scholars speculate that Saikaku
may have specifically targeted the Edo market when he wrote them, since
Edo was the center of the Tokugawa bakufu and thus a city of warriors, and
may have represented a relatively untapped market for his books.
Saikaku finally turned to the subject of commerce in his books on mer-
chants. Here, for the first time, he could put on display his nuanced under-
standing of money-making. Saikaku had of course thought deeply about the
subject all his life but produced only three titles about merchants, far fewer

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than his books on love and the same number as his books on warriors. The
first of them was Nippon eitaigura (Japan’s Eternal Storehouse; Osaka, Kyoto,
and Edo, 1688), in which he opened with this defense of the need for money
among all classes of people.
All life long we face the urgent problem of making a living. This is true for
warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants alike, not to speak of monks and
Shinto priests. In the end, everyone should accumulate gold and silver as
preordained by the gods. Two parents give us life, but gold and silver are the
parents who sustain life.
This common-sense idea smacked of heresy under Tokugawa rule, for
merchants and their money were often perceived as suspect, in large part
because wealth undermined official ideology by placing rich merchants
“above” their superiors, the warrior class, in the de facto economy.
Saikaku’s next book on merchants was Seken munezan’yō (Mental
Calculations for Surviving in the World; Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, 1692),
which focused on the settling of accounts on New Year’s Eve that meant
prosperity or bankruptcy for merchants, alluded to earlier in Saikaku’s verse
from Haikai sanga no tsu. In addition, stories on merchant life make up one of
Saikaku’s posthumous publications, Saikaku oridome (Saikaku’s Final
Weaving; Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, 1694), again edited by Dansui.
Throughout the last decade of his life as a writer of ukiyo-zōshi, Saikaku
also produced works on a range of topics that resist the three-part categor-
ization of books on love, warriors, and merchants. These include books on
travel, such as Saikaku shokoku banashi (Saikaku’s Stories from the Provinces;
Osaka, 1685) and Futokoro suzuri (Inkstone in the Breast Pocket, 1687); a
parody, Honchō nijū fukō (Twenty Cases of Unfilial Piety in Our Land;
Osaka and Edo, 1685), which spoofs the Confucian classic that describes
twenty-four cases of filial behavior; and a collection of stories about crime
and punishment, Honchō ōin hiji (Legal Judgments in the Shade of the Cherry
Tree in Our Land; Osaka and Edo, 1689). Dansui edited three posthumous
miscellanies, apparently from unpublished stories that may have been
rejected for earlier publication, titled Saikaku zoku tsurezure (Saikaku’s
Common Man’s Essays in Idleness; Osaka and Kyoto, 1695), Saikaku nagori
no tomo (Saikaku’s Farewell to Friends; Osaka, 1699), and Saikaku’s only
collection of epistolary writings, Saikaku yorozu no fumi hōgu (Saikaku’s
Myriad Scraps of Letters; Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, 1696).
There is evidence that Saikaku had begun to be active again in haikai
composition from about 1690. If this is so, then his literary life came full circle,

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returning to the poetic form that started him off on his career when he
produced the haikai sequence A Thousand Verses Composed Alone in a Single
Day to mourn the death of his wife in 1675. When Saikaku died on the tenth
day of the eighth month, 1693, at the age of fifty-two, he left behind a final
verse, recorded in volume 1 of Saikaku’s Parting Gift.
Fifty years, they say, is the span of a man’s life; even so, I have surpassed it:
An extra two years spent gazing at the moon in this floating world.
(Ukiyo no tsuki misugoshinikeri sue ninen)

Ejima Kiseki
Compared to the absence of reliable information about Saikaku’s early life,
Ejima Kiseki’s origins are well documented. His real name was Murase
Gonnojō, and he was born heir to Daibutsu Mochiya, a successful confec-
tionary business that had been manufacturing rice cakes (mochi) in Kyoto for
three generations. In 1694 when Kiseki was twenty-eight, he took over the
family business upon his father’s death, and from this point his writing career
took off. (Coincidentally, this was the year after Saikaku’s death.)
Kiseki wrote his first play for the jōruri narrator Matsumoto Jidayū. Titled
Daigaran hōmotsu kagami (Treasure Mirror of the Great Temple, 1696), its
publication marked the beginning of Kiseki’s collaboration with the Kyoto
publisher Hachimonjiya Jishō (d. 1745), which was to prove most fruitful for
his career. Jishō was a savvy judge of the market for books and himself a
writer of ukiyo-zōshi, and he also had a knack for producing books in
attractive and beautifully illustrated new formats that were appealing to
readers. The combination of Kiseki’s writing style and Jishō’s business skills
would make them both very rich.
One early Hachimonjiya publication of Kiseki’s had an especially lasting
impact on the genre of actor evaluation books. Titled Yakusha kuchi samisen
(The Actor’s Hummed Shamisen, 1699), it consisted of three volumes, one for
actors performing in kabuki theaters in each of the three major cities, Kyoto,
Edo, and Osaka. Previous books in the genre had focused almost exclusively
on describing an actor’s good looks, a vestige of the genre’s origins in books
evaluating courtesans in the pleasure quarters. Kiseki emphasized instead the
quality of an actor’s dramatic performance on stage and assigned actors a
rank accordingly from high to low. This innovation proved to be very
popular with kabuki theatergoers, whom Jishō must have perceived to be
more serious than other publishers realized, and The Actor’s Hummed

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Shamisen thus came to set the standard for all future actor evaluation books
for the rest of the Edo period. Scholars have even suggested that it ultimately
laid the foundation for modern theater criticism in the Meiji and Taishō
periods.
Kiseki’s first foray into the genre of ukiyo-zōshi was a five-volume
Hachimonjiya publication titled Keisei iro samisen (The Courtesan’s
Shamisen of Love, 1701), which appeared with Jishō listed as the author.
The book provided readers with intimate stories of the most sought-after
courtesans of the day in pleasure quarters throughout Japan. Kiseki imitated
and even plagiarized Saikaku in the work, but he also introduced a new
perspective to the material by paying special attention to subtle differences in
regional and social status of the male patrons of the pleasure quarters. The
success of The Courtesan’s Shamisen of Love led him to produce more books on
love over the next decade, culminating in Kiseki’s masterpiece Keisei kintanki
(Courtesans Forbidden to be Short-Tempered, 1711). It was a six-volume tour
de force that opened with two volumes debating the relative merits of female
courtesans versus male actors as lovers; as it turned out, those advocating the
love of women won the debate. Volume 3 gave detailed tips for engaging
prostitutes outside the officially sanctioned pleasure quarters; and Volumes 4
through 6 described courtesans in the official quarters: Yoshiwara in Edo,
Shinmachi in Osaka, and finally Shimabara in Kyoto.
Since acclaim for these literary successes was going to Jishō as “author,”
Kiseki naturally objected and began demanding a greater share of the profits.
In 1714, he finally split with the Hachimonjiya and established his own
publishing firm for his books, which thereafter credited himself as author.
It was in this period that Kiseki produced bestsellers such as the katagi-mono
(character books) titled Seken musuko katagi (Characters of Sons in the World,
1715) and Seken musume katagi (Characters of Daughters in the World, 1717);
and a jidai-mono (historical or “period” book) titled Kokusen’ya minchō taiheiki
(Coxinga and the Ming Dynasty Chronicle of Great Peace, 1717). After these
successes he was able to negotiate from a position of strength with Jishō and
finally reconciled with him in 1718.
It is sometimes said that Kiseki lacked Saikaku’s intellect but was master of
the human heart. Kiseki’s skillful use of sentimentality in his writings
appealed to a broad readership in his day, and this quality allowed his
works to exert on ongoing influence on Edo period letters. With the advent
of the Meiji era in 1868, Kiseki’s character books inspired first-generation
Meiji writers such as Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) to create modern rendi-
tions of the genre such as Tōsei shosei katagi (Characters of Students in Our

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 Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki: the literature of urban townspeople

Day, 1885). But it was second-generation Meiji writers in search of the literary
sensibilities of realism and naturalism then emerging in the late nineteenth-
century and early twentieth-century European novel who found a kindred
spirit in Saikaku, especially after the first modern print edition of his writings
appeared in 1894. The human condition as conveyed so compellingly in
Saikaku’s writings from two centuries prior inspired Kōda Rohan (1867–
1947), Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–96), and other literary experimenters to try to
depict their contemporary world with a similar clarity and style.

423
 43
Representing theater: text
and performance in kabuki and bunraku
c. andrew gerstle

Since the fourteenth century, theater has been at the center of cultural life in
Japan to an extent rare in the world. For a single nation the tradition is rich,
and unparalleled in its diversity and continuity in the production of dramatic
literature and in stage practice. However, the West’s long tradition of dra-
matic literature – from classical Greece through Shakespeare and modern
playwrights – colors our view of Japanese (and much other non-Western)
theater in which the actor’s performance, rather than the playwright’s text,
has remained central. Since several Japanese theatrical traditions – noh,
kyōgen, bunraku (jōruri), and kabuki – continue to the present as living lineages
of actors passing on their skills from generation to generation, actors have
maintained control over the interpretations of (their) texts on the stage. As a
consequence, scholars, Japanese or otherwise, are thrust into a complex
relationship with the drama both as performance under the firm control of
professional, highly trained actors, and as historical play texts, the physical
objects of literary or historical research. Scholars or directors do not share the
unfettered freedom to interpret the texts of their counterparts in the West,
where actors long ago lost their monopoly over the tradition.
Performance of any kind, whether the recitation of a poem, the singing of a
song, a dance, or a stage play, is by definition a social or communal event, and
much of its magical pleasure comes from being an experience in common
with others in a group. And yet a performance is ephemeral and dissipates
into thin air at its conclusion, left only as a fleeting memory for the
participants.
Although the stage production was the focus and although actors
remained more powerful than playwrights within troupes, writers employed
by the actors or the theaters nevertheless produced a massive amount of play
texts, some of which were published (noh, bunraku) from as early as the
seventeenth century and many others (kabuki) which mostly remained in

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manuscript until the modern era. As many as 1,500 full-day play texts for the
bunraku puppet theater (shōhon, also called maruhon; includes the chanter’s
notation) were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
even larger numbers of kabuki plays were composed until into the twentieth
century, and large numbers survive as manuscripts. We now have a repre-
sentative number of English translations of bunraku and kabuki plays.1
Written play texts, however, were only one type of representation of
performance.
Kabuki did not, as a rule, publish the plays it produced on stage, but
commercial publication of other forms of theatrical representation flou-
rished. The range of publication around kabuki, in particular, was (and is)
vast. The most important Tokugawa era genres were:2

• yakusha hyōbanki (actor critiques published annually from 1659 through the
nineteenth century
• eiri kyōgen-bon (illustrated summary versions of kabuki with considerable
text)
• ezukushi-kyōgen-bon (illustrated plot summaries of kabuki with little text)
• yakusha ehon (illustrated books on actors)
• gekisho (illustrated books on theater)
• yakusha-e (single-sheet or multiple-sheet actor prints)
• yakusha nendaiki (chronologies of actors’ careers)
• kao-mise banzuke (opening season playbills, with a list of actors contracted
for the coming year)
• yakuwari banzuke (playbills listing actors in their various roles in the play)
• ehon (or ezukushi) banzuke (illustrated pamphlets of all the scenes of the play
with the actors and roles listed)
• surimono (single-sheet, privately produced prints of poetry and images)
• eiri nehon (illustrated playbooks in yomihon fiction format)
• mitate banzuke (single- or multiple-sheet, topical and fictional playbills).

How did a man or woman in 1800 interact with the theater? The answer to
this question will, of course, include attendance at bi-monthly productions of
kabuki and/or bunraku at commercial theaters, but it will also involve other

1
Library searches under the authors listed here will lead to English translations of bunraku
and kabuki in books and anthologies: James Brandon, Karen Brazell, C. Andrew Gerstle,
Stanleigh Jones, Donald Keene, Samuel Leiter, and Haruo Shirane. Asian Theatre Journal
and Monumenta Nipponica also contain translations.
2
Akama Ryō has produced a thorough survey and analysis of these different genres in
Zusetsu: Edo engekisho (Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 2003).

425
 c. andrew gerstle

kinds of interaction. They would be likely to buy playbills and illustrated

summary pamphlets as well as actor prints of their favorites. Later they might
borrow the annual actor critique book from a lending library to read about
the performances they had seen, and might be part of a poetry salon, the
meetings of which actors sometimes joined, or be a member of a fan club and
join in its activities with actors. And importantly, they were likely to be
amateur performers themselves, taking lessons regularly from professionals.
If they could paint, they might take a turn at drawing an actor portrait, and if
in Osaka, they might design an actor print. They (men or women) might
even be bold enough to pay for a tryst with a young actor. Kabuki and
bunraku theater was an integral part of culture and socializing. Interaction
with the theater was not passive in the sense of only buying a ticket, attending
the performance, and returning home. This is also true for poetry. One read
poetry not only alone to contemplate its essence, but also primarily in order
to learn how to compose verses to perform at poetry parties at the teacher’s
salon. Individuals contributed actively to various performance subcultures;
cultural salons were the primary means through which Japanese socialized in
the Tokugawa period.
We know that from as early as the sixteenth century it had become
common for private individuals, including samurai leaders such as
Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, to learn noh chanting and
dance as an amateur hobby. Noh had become so important to the ruling
samurai class by 1600 that the Tokugawa regime made it their house art, a
decision that would influence the entire samurai class throughout the nation.
A remarkable situation developed in which noh chanting and dance became
key educational attributes of samurai, along with training in the martial arts.
The demand for practice texts from amateur performers spurred the pub-
lication of noh playbooks complete with “secret” musical notation from early
in the seventeenth century. To “read” a noh play meant to learn to perform it
from a professional actor. This custom of learning a theatrical art as a cultural
hobby would come, in the Tokugawa era, to permeate all levels of Japanese
society.
Wrenched from the public sphere at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, noh (and its companion kyōgen) ceased to develop as it had
throughout the sixteenth century and became a relatively fossilized and
ritualistic drama, with a fixed repertoire. Two new forms – kabuki and
bunraku (jōruri) puppet theater – filled the void left in the urban commercial
performance space. Although today these two theaters share many plays in
common, kabuki and bunraku differ fundamentally in their origins and

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essence. Jōruri was the inheritor of the long oral storytelling tradition of blind
musicians that flourished at least from the end of the twelfth century after the
Heike/Genji civil war. From the point when these storytellers joined with
the separate tradition of puppetry around 1600, the storytellers had eyesight
although the accompanying shamisen musicians remained blind until the
second half of the eighteenth century. In bunraku, the story is the most
important element, and it is the chanter (tayū) who is the focus; the puppet-
eers gained status over the centuries, but until the second half of the
twentieth century people went to bunraku to “listen” (kiki ni iku) rather
than to “watch,” as people say today. It is no accident, therefore, that bunraku
texts, like the noh, were published from the seventeenth century onwards,
initially with only minimal notation for voice but from the 1680s onward with
the full chanter’s notation, in response to demand from the market of
amateur performers. There is a high likelihood that our theatergoer in the
year 1800, male or female, in Kyoto, Osaka, or Edo, or in more rural areas,
would have at some point in his or her life learned gidayū (bunraku) chanting.
Bunraku chanters and shamisen players have always made part of their living
from teaching, and a tradition of female gidayū teachers developed alongside
the male line. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these women-gidayū
performers (onna gidayū, musume gidayū) performed commercially as well,
although without puppets.
Vasili Golownin, a Russian sea captain captured and put in jail in
Matsumae on the southern edge of Hokkaido Island in the years 1811–13,
noted in his diary:
The Japanese are extremely fond of reading; even common soldiers when on
duty are continually engaged with books. This passion for literature, how-
ever, proved somewhat inconvenient to us, as they always read aloud, in a
tone of voice resembling singing; much in the same style in which the Psalms
are read at funerals in Russia. Before we became accustomed to this, we were
unable to enjoy a moment’s rest during the night. The history of their native
country, the contests that have arisen among themselves, and the wars in
which they have been engaged with neighbouring nations, form the subjects
of their favorite books, which are all printed in Japan.3

This description makes it clear that the texts were bunraku plays. Even in the
remote frontiers of Japan as far as Hokkaido amateur chanting was well
established by early in the nineteenth century. Surviving records show that

3
Vasili Golownin, Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan during the Years 1811, 1812, and 1813, vol. 1
(London, 1824 [reprint 1973]), 303.

427
 c. andrew gerstle

bunraku-style puppet performances were regularly held at nearly two hun-

dred rural sites from the Edo through Meiji periods. We also know that
amateur and semi-professional troupes of kabuki regularly performed around
the country. Because of wide amateur interest, large numbers of bunraku
books remained in print throughout the Edo period. The 1805 publication
Jōruri gedai mokuroku lists several Osaka publishers and a total of 619 different
titles; an Edo list of keikobon (practice texts of individual acts or scenes) from
1816 has 159 shōhon, 470 keikobon, and 68 michiyuki texts, a total of 697 titles.
Kabuki, in contrast to bunraku, developed from dance, with the actor’s
physical body as the focus. Women and men performers vied for prominence
in the early seventeenth century, but, as is well known, kabuki performances
were garish affairs and the association with both male and female prostitution
was overt. From the mid seventeenth century the government restricted
public performances to adult males in order to control prostitution. This
worked to push kabuki to develop as drama, but actors continued to be
worshiped as sex idols, and particularly in the early part of their careers, to
serve as prostitutes (iroko) for men and women. Eroticism of the actor’s body
has been and continues to remain fundamental to kabuki. In contrast to noh
and bunraku, however, kabuki actors have never taught acting to amateurs;
they keep their histrionic skills secret within the guild-like troupe. This does
not mean that the audience did not interact directly with kabuki actors
outside the theater. Kabuki dance in the eighteenth century became a widely
popular amateur activity, and many kabuki actors were and are dance
teachers. Fans also took lessons in various forms of kabuki music, such as
Kiyomoto, Nagauta, and Tomimoto. Gidayū chanting and kabuki dance and
music were also the fundamental skills learned by professional actors and
geisha in their training.
Another contrast with noh and bunraku is that kabuki, as a rule, did not
allow the publication of its plays, although these did circulate as manuscripts
and there was a period of publication of as many as seventy plays with
illustrations (eiri nehon) in Osaka from around 1800 till the Meiji era. Major
theaters in the three main cities employed staff playwrights, but their work
remained the property of the theater, and plays were regularly rewritten for
each performance for the particular ensemble of actors.
Because both bunraku and kabuki were performer-centered, it was con-
ventional that plays were written anew for each production by a team of in-
house playwrights, for the particular ensemble of performers. Although the
plays were composed and performed within a literate world, there was a
conscious sense of keeping the orality of performance paramount. The actors

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 Representing theater: text and performance in kabuki and bunraku

maintained control over the medium and patterns of composition preserved

some elements of orality. This was the case for bunraku until the 1780s and
for kabuki until the twentieth century.
During the time of the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725),
who wrote for both the bunraku and kabuki stages, it became standard to
publish complete bunraku texts at the time of first performance with the
name of the playwright as author, but the name of the senior chanter was also
included on the final page of the book, authenticating the accuracy of the
code of musical notation in the text. For the theatergoer or “reader,” the real
“text” was a performance, and most readers learned from professionals how
to perform plays as a hobby, a tradition that remained vibrant until World
War II. We see, however, in Chikamatsu a distinctly different attitude toward
past tales than that of Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443?) in noh drama, who wrote
that playwrights should stick closely to the source, even using exact phrases
from the original. All of Chikamatsu’s seventy or so period plays (jidai-mono)
are set in the context of a well-known story with a distinctive source, yet the
works are very different from the source. Creativity in bunraku theater from
the seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries was the production of variations
of known stories for each new program. It was unusual to perform the same
play again and again, with little or no change, until after the mid eighteenth
century, when creativity came to mean innovation in performance of the
repertoire.
Chikamatsu himself wrote many plays that were a variation on the same
source, such as the vendetta of the Soga brothers or the adventures of
Minamoto no Yorimitsu (Raikō). The professional playwright’s ethic, ideally
for kabuki or bunraku, was to create a new play for each performance every
two months or so. A distinctive aspect of this tradition was the refashioning
of an old tale to bear relevance to the immediate present. The period plays
are invariably set within the context of one of the major tales of the collective
memory, but the crucial, climactic act three always brings the story to the
present, and usually the tragic hero is a fictional character, most often not a
high personage, but rather a figure similar to the audience of the time. The
tales, usually about political intrigue, are set in the past, but in fact were about
contemporary Tokugawa government and society. The overall structure of a
five-act play is relatively formulaic with each act having a distinctive tone and
atmosphere, and act five always ending with an auspicious conclusion, giving
hope for prosperity and stability to the community. Originality in this context
lay in creating a variation on the known tale, and in bringing it to bear
relevance to the audience at the particular moment of the performance.

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Mikhail Bakhtin describes the transition from the European medieval epic
to post-Renaissance novelistic consciousness in terms that seem to describe
bunraku and kabuki as well.
Both the singer and the listener, immanent in the epic as a genre, are located
in the same time and on the same evaluative (hierarchical) plane, but the
represented world of the heroes stands on an utterly different and inacces-
sible time-and-value place, separated by epic distance. To portray an event
on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries (and
an event that is therefore based on personal experience and thought) is to
undertake a radical revolution, and to step out of the world of the epic into
the world of the novel.4

Japan did begin in the mid to late seventeenth century to produce com-
mercial fiction, ukiyo-zōshi, depicting all aspects of contemporary society, but
the “oral” or “performance” tradition remained predominant as the mindset
for the creation and interaction with narrative. In bunraku from
Chikamatsu’s age onward, the plays are set in the past, but in the climactic
sections the story and characters are brought to the present. In Edo kabuki we
often see the opposite where the setting is clearly the present but underneath
lies the world of the past memory, such as in the many variations of the
Sukeroku play or in Yotsuya kaidan by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829), where
the contemporary characters such as Sukeroku and Iemon have connections
with tales long in the past. Jōruri (bunraku) emerged out of the epic tradition,
but soon developed an ethic of innovation, of altering the content, to produce
a new version of the past stories and legends. Kabuki, on the other hand,
begins in the present and looks back to the past with an eye to toy with it, to
give new meaning to the present. Influence back and forth between these
theaters, which sat side by side in entertainment districts, continued from the
seventeenth to nineteenth centuries but at the core this distinction remained
intact.
Today we speak of kabuki as a single tradition but in fact the dramas
composed in Kyoto/Osaka (Kamigata) and those in Edo were considerably
different. The acting styles, as well, were distinct. In general, the plays and
acting styles of Kyoto/Osaka were more realistic and delicate/refined
(wagoto) as opposed to the more fantastic stories and exaggerated histrionics
of Edo (aragoto). Bunraku’s influence was greater in Kyoto/Osaka where
playwrights tended to get their training in writing for bunraku first, because

4
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 14.

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 Representing theater: text and performance in kabuki and bunraku

the status of the playwright in bunraku was higher than in kabuki and the
plays were published under the authors’ names. Because today kabuki has
come to be dominated by Tokyo, the view of kabuki’s dual history is
distorted. Edo kabuki was not predominant until well into the nineteenth
century.
Late in the eighteenth century, Osaka kabuki playwrights, most likely
Namiki Shōza (also read Shōzō, 1730–73) in particular, came to formulate a
theory of composition based on the concept of sekai, meaning a “world,” the
context of some known story from the past, and shukō, meaning innovation
or twist. The word shukō is an old term used in the discussion of the arts
including poetry from earliest times. The formal dichotomy of sekai/shukō
only developed as a distinctive theory in the kabuki theater in the late
eighteenth century, but it of course emerged out of the bunraku/kabuki
tradition described above. This structure importantly also came to be a
conventional aspect of popular fiction that flourished from the late eight-
eenth century particularly in Edo. A manuscript dating before 1791 entitled
Sekai kōmoku (A Guide to Historical Settings) was an in-house guidebook for
Edo kabuki playwrights, listing the range of sekai under various headings
such as emperors, famous historical, legendary or literary figures, and book
or play titles. Each heading, then, is followed by a list of possible roles
(yakumei), jōruri texts (gidayū), and other (usually earlier) sources (hikisho).
This source indicates a key framework for play construction.
Until Chikamatsu began writing in the 1680s, plays were considered to be
the product of the chanters themselves, essentially something that they had
inherited from their masters. Chikamatsu was hired to write for specific
performers: first as an apprentice to Uji Kaganojō (1635–1711) and then for
Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714) and his successors, as well as in collaboration
with kabuki actors. He had to write to suit the fully formed conventions and
formulas of the performance traditions in which these two chanters worked.
Although bunraku was part of a literate urban world and the plays were
regularly published in full, the formulaic nature of oral performance was its
heritage. Gidayū, in his first long preface to a collection of his best pieces
(Jōkyō yonen Gidayū danmonoshū, 1687), gives us a clear idea of this archetypical
formula for the five acts of a play, which is cyclical leading from an auspicious
beginning, through crisis and tragedy, to salvation and a return to auspicious
order at the end. Almost all of Chikamatsu’s works and most of the later
famous bunraku plays remained within this framework. The leap that
Bakhtin suggests between the medieval epic and the urban novel is evident
in Chikamatsu and the later playwrights. The heroes, such as Kansuke’s old

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mother in Chikamatsu’s Shinshū kawanakajima kassen (Battles of

Kawanakajima, 1721) and Gonta in Yoshitsune senbon zakura (Yoshitsune and
the Thousand Cherry Trees, 1747) are invariably representatives of contem-
porary society, often characters with no political power such as women, or
men who have fallen into disrepute.
Most of the more than one thousand five-act bunraku plays produced in
the eighteenth century are variations of some kind on this formula, including
Chikamatsu’s best jidai-mono. The fundamental context that we need to
remember is that the audience for these performances was participating in a
collective venture. They knew the outline of the stories, and the main
players; they came to the performance to experience a known tale in a
distinctive re-creation that existed at two levels: the historical memory and
the immediate present. The crucial difference from the pre-Tokugawa oral-
narrative tradition is that the audiences came to want the stories to be about
their own lives, to reflect contemporary life, not just tales of exalted perso-
nages long past.
Chikamatsu is justly famous for his development of the sewa-mono genre of
plays set entirely in his contemporary times and focusing on ordinary heroes
and heroines, many of whom were orphans or prostitutes of the commoner
class. His twenty-four contemporary-life works are remarkable for their focus
on real incidents of love suicide, murder, adultery, and other crimes invol-
ving ordinary men and women who face tragic endings. Shinjū Ten-no-
Amijima (Love Suicides at Amijima, 1720) and Onna koroshi abura no jigoku
(Woman-killer and the Hell of Oil, 1721) are two masterpieces of this sub-
genre. Chikamatsu brings this experience to bear in his late period (historical)
plays where the tragic heroes and heroines also tend to be figures without
political power such as women or men who have fallen from their positions
due to dereliction. The men and women who face the ultimate test of self-
sacrifice for their own honor or for a greater cause were usually individuals
low on the social scale or those without power or those who had lost their
position in society. The plays, whether set in the present or far in the past,
were understood straightforwardly to be about the contemporary life of the
audience, and were often indirectly critical of contemporary politics. The
sekai world is the collective memory; the shukō innovation brings this
cultural and social memory to the present.
Even in ostensibly military contexts the tragic heroes are often women.
The ultimate hero of Kokusen’ya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga, 1715) is not
General Coxinga, the historic figure, but his Chinese half-sister, a fictional
character, and his Japanese mother who both sacrifice themselves for the

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greater cause. The play, as well, has been analysed as being covertly about the
Tokugawa Bakufu’s policies. The hero of Battles of Kawanakajima is not one of
the famous generals of military history, Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin, or
Yamamoto Kansuke, but the seventy-two-year-old mother of Kansuke. The
male heroes, as well, are not figures of power, but are almost always those
who have lost their position for some indiscretion, such as the child-murderer
Sarushima no Sōta in Futago sumidagawa (Twins at the Sumida River, 1720) or
the murderer Bunjibei in Tsu no kuni meoto-ike (Lovers Pond in Settsu
Province, 1721). These figures were all depicted as the audiences’ contempor-
aries even if the tales were set in times long past. Chikamatsu’s works, then,
came to be the model for later playwrights.
The late 1740s saw the composition of several works that became the most
popular plays in both the bunraku and kabuki repertoires. The most famous
are: Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy,
1746); Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (1747); Kanadehon Chūshingura
(Treasury of the 47 Loyal Retainers, 1748). These were all written coopera-
tively by Namiki Senryū (Sōsuke, 1695–1751), Takeda Izumo II (1691–1756), and
Miyoshi Shōraku (1696–1772). In 1751, Namiki Sōsuke returned to the
Toyotake theater and wrote his final play: Ichinotani futaba gunki
(Chronicles of the Battle of Ichinotani, 1751). The tragic figures from these
dramas – Sakuramaru, Gonta, Kanpei, and Kumagai – became the enduring
image of the popular hero well into modern times. All of these are represen-
tations of shukō innovation in sekai worlds that were well known to the
audience; they are all “fallen” men in the sense of having committed a
transgression. These heroes are of low status and often weak characters,
either entirely fictional or marginally historical. They tend to be reflections of
contemporary Edo period commoners. It became conventional that high-
status or historical figures did not fill the roles of tragic heroes in either sewa-
mono or jidai-mono. In all cases the crux of the tragedy is the will of a
character to sacrifice either himself or a loved one. All of the tragic-hero
characters in period plays have committed some indiscretion prior to the
action of the crucial scene. Even if they are of relatively low status, they fall
further, and in act three face tragedy as a choice to prove their honor and
virtue.
Can we analyse kabuki in the same way as bunraku? Although surrounded
by an array of publications such as actor prints, critique books, illustrated
summary books, and selections of famous speeches, throughout the Edo
period kabuki did not allow the publication of complete texts. This is in stark
contrast to bunraku, which from the early seventeenth century has almost

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always published full, authorized editions of each play at the time of first
performance. This was certainly a decision of the actors themselves, who
could have made money through publishing. Hundreds of kabuki manu-
scripts have survived but these were part of the troupe’s possession, kept
from becoming fixed texts in print. The conventions of oral performance
were consciously maintained in kabuki as well as bunraku. Each performance
was to be a new version of a well-known story.
Play production in bunraku and kabuki flourished in Kyoto and Osaka
until the end of the eighteenth century. From the late eighteenth century,
however, Edo increasingly became a producer of popular literature. In the
last half of the eighteenth century Edo writers, including Hiraga Gennai
(1728–80), produced about fifty bunraku plays. One key incident in kabuki
history reflects the rising economic power and cultural will of the city of Edo.
Namiki Gohei, the foremost kabuki playwright of his age, was at the peak of
his career in 1794. He wrote dramas for theaters and actors in Kyoto and
Osaka. Sawamura Sōjūrō III (Tosshi, 1755–1801), an Edo-born actor who
returned to Edo in 1794 after a tour in Osaka, had arranged for Gohei to
return with him to Edo as a staff playwright to write plays for him and his
troupe. Kabuki is driven by commercial imperatives. Sōjūrō and his financial
backers had persuaded the star playwright of the age to move to Edo. Gohei,
then, remained in Edo until his death in 1808 and was influential in bringing
Osaka-style playwriting to Edo and influencing playwrights such as Tsuruya
Nanboku IV, who would usher in a boom in Edo playwriting. Kawatake
Mokuami (1816–93) was the final star in this lineage and was one of the few
artists whose careers successfully bridged the Meiji Restoration.
From as early as the seventeenth century a vast amount of visual records of
actors in books and single-sheet prints survive. While Kyoto/Osaka pub-
lished books relating to kabuki, such as the actor critiques for all three cities,
bunraku plays, and illustrated theater books such as eiri kyōgen-bon and eiri
jōruri-bon, Edo took the lead in graphic representation, particularly of single-
sheet prints. Throughout the history of ukiyo-e, actor prints were the
mainstay of the industry, produced regularly for the bi-monthly kabuki
programmes, and scholars have been able to document many of the works
to a particular date and performance. From the late seventeenth century until
the late nineteenth century, the amount of prints produced and still extant is
enormous.
Visual interest was primarily for the exaggeratedly histrionic poses of the
rough, bombastic style (aragoto) characteristic of Edo kabuki in general and
the Ichikawa Danjūrō line in particular. The other interest, of course, was the

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female-role specialists, the onnagata. The representation of the male, heroic

lead was exaggerated in body movement and in facial expression, but the
onnagata was represented almost always in a generic style that was little
different from the representation of women in prints and paintings (bijinga).
Mutō has suggested that this may have been a clever way for publishers to
extend the shelf life of the print as a bijinga after the play had ended.5
Onnagata were early on represented as wakashū, young men in feminine
poses, but from at least the 1730s they are almost always represented in Edo as
if they were women, not men dressed as women. Osaka from the 1780s
produced a separate tradition of actor prints that often depicted onnagata
more realistically as male actors.
Actors were beyond the pale in their official social status beneath the four
classes of warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant, but, as with film or TV
actors today, kabuki actors were fêted as sexual and cultural icons by their
fans, including the samurai. The key means for actors to socialize with
patrons was through poetry circles. A convention developed from at least
the late seventeenth century for individuals to adopt a pen-name (haigō,
haimyō) no matter what their social status or region in order to participate
in haiku circles and other cultural activities. Within the cultural salon (za), it
also became an accepted convention that this fictional space was egalitarian,
and class or status did not matter. Within the temporarily constructed sphere
of the salon, individuals took on an identity distinct from their home/work
existence. While rarely politically active, these Japanese salons were, by their
egalitarian ethic, inherently culturally and socially subversive within a
national ideology based on strict and legal segregation by class, status,
profession, and region. The role of the arts, therefore, was an essential
catalyst for social intercourse and development. The theaters were impor-
tant, highly active nodes in a national network of cultural salons. Surimono,
privately published decorative prints with poems, are magnificent sources
that show us how actors circulated in society.
In Osaka and Kyoto the system of fan clubs was well developed. There
were more than five fan clubs that flourished during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in Osaka alone. Each had its rituals to support actors and
performances, especially the first performance of the season in the eleventh
month. It is clear that many Osaka businessmen were involved in these clubs
as part of their social life. In Edo, the focus of fan clubs was often on and

5
Mutō Junko, Shoki ukiyoe to kabuki: yakusha-e ni chūmoku shite (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō,
2005), 61.

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around Ichikawa Danjūrō, whichever generation the actor. Danjūrō V

(Hakuen, 1741–1806) was one of the more active of the lineage at a time of
great cultural activity in Edo in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He
came to serve as an icon for Edo writers and poets such as Ōta Nanpo
(1749–1823) and Utei Enba (1743–1822). Under his pen-name Hakuen, he was
active in haiku and kyōka poetry groups, gaining fame not only as a star actor
but also as a cultivated individual deserving great respect.
The theater, therefore, was not just the plays on stage. It was a vibrant
aspect and stimulant of cultural life in the Edo period, one in which indivi-
duals from all walks of life participated through a wide variety of means.

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 44
Puppet theater: from early jōruri to the
golden age
janice kanemitsu

Jōruri refers to the vocal art of dramatic narration. A single reciter (the tayū)
typically performs both the narration and the dialogue of multiple characters,
together with a samisen player (shamisen-biki) who functions more like an
additional voice – signaling such dramatic elements as the opening of a new
scene or act, the shift to a different location, or non-verbal emotional cues –
than a musical accompaniment. In ningyō jōruri, puppets represent this aural
world created by the reciter and musician. Ningyō jōruri lay at the heart of
Edo popular culture in multiple ways: as a dramatic genre based on a
tradition of orally performed narratives; in its dramaturgical relationship
with kabuki (involving mutual exchange of plots, conventions, and tropes);
in its influence on both performance and printed scripts; and as a medium for
disseminating information and news on social scandals and current events.

Early Jōruri
Jōruri takes its name from Lady Jōruri, the female protagonist of a late
sixteenth-century narrative that was gradually adapted into a new style of
recitation. Various works portraying the late twelfth-century tragic romance
between Lady Jōruri and a young Minamoto no Yoshitsune suggest that
female entertainers working at post stations along well-traveled thorough-
fares played an instrumental role in the creation and early dissemination of
the legend. Though Lady Jōruri is supposed to have been the daughter of an
affluent lord, the portrayal of her and her residence shares much in common
with popular female entertainers in well-equipped houses of pleasure. While
itinerant male storytellers subsequently recited these tales to the accompani-
ment of the lute-like biwa, the samisen – a three-stringed instrument intro-
duced to Japan via the Ryūkyū Islands in the late 1500s – later became the
preferred instrument.

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Since the Tokugawa period, jōruri works have been grouped into ko-jōruri
(old jōruri) and shin- or tōryū-jōruri (new or contemporary jōruri), which
begins in 1685 with Shusse Kagekiyo (Kagekiyo Victorious) by the playwright
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). Ko-jōruri shares several characteristics
with early trends in woodblock printing. Just as medieval narratives supplied
much of the early sources of Edo printed fiction, most ko-jōruri drew heavily
on plots from katari-mono (orally recited narratives) – such as famous episodes
from Heike monogatari (The Tales of the Heike) or from Soga monogatari (The
Tale of the Revenge of the Soga Brothers) – or reworkings of narratives from
other dramatic genres, such as noh, sekkyō-bushi (sermon ballads), and
kōwakamai (kōwaka-bukyoku, ballad dramas). Ko-jōruri also adapted plots
from illustrated Muromachi tales as well as favorite episodes from literary
masterpieces such as The Tale of Genji. Despite the gradual shift from outdoor
performances by itinerant storytellers to stationary theaters with professional
performers, ko-jōruri often had plots that adapted performed narratives or
other texts into the narrative style of jōruri. The stories, puppetry, and use of
theatrical space at this time remained generally simplistic and two-
dimensional.
Kinpira jōruri, an Edo-born subgenre of ko-jōruri, offered a breath of fresh
air to theatergoers who yearned for something more than the retelling of
earlier tales. Named after one of its fictional protagonists, Sakata Kinpira, this
short-lived subgenre flourished for roughly a five-year period from 1657 to
1662. The first play Kiyohara no Udaishō (Kiyohara Right Major Captain),
composed by Oka Seibei Kiyotoshi, introduced a familiar cast of characters:
the Heian general Minamoto Yorimitsu (948–1021, also known as Raikō), his
retired father Minamoto Mitsunaka (912–97, also known as Manjū), his
younger brother Yorinobu, and his quartet of fiercely loyal retainers, nick-
named the Four Heavenly Guardians (Shitennō) – Watanabe Tsuna, Usui
Sadamitsu, Urabe Suetake, and Sakata Kintoki – along with their fictional
sons and grandsons. The series authored by Oka ends in 1662 with the death
of Kintoki’s son, Kinpira, in Kinpira no saigo (The Death of Kinpira).
In addition to its cast of original characters, Kinpira jōruri spun tales set in
the Heian period that re-imagined the Minamoto generals in situations
suggestive of Tokugawa shoguns. Kinpira jōruri thus modernized the
Minamoto generals and their Four Heavenly Guardians into contemporary
heroes of early modern Japan’s political world – slayers not of demons, such
as Shūtendōji and the Earth Spider, but of rebels and traitors who threatened
the public order of the sovereign rule that granted the shogunate its
legitimacy.

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During the years from 1655 to 1673, Kinpira jōruri in its broadest sense
(including plays in which any of the five generations of Minamoto generals
and their Four Heavenly Guardians appeared) accounted for nearly half of all
jōruri produced. Kinpira jōruri kick-started the printing of playbooks in Edo,
a publishing genre that had previously been limited to the Kyoto-Osaka
region. Moreover, the cross-generational sequels of Kinpira jōruri promoted
the sharing of characters and familial narratives across regional and artistic
lineages – playwrights and reciters, east and west, added prequels and new
adventures to the lives of the Minamoto generals and their faithful sidekicks.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) composed over one hundred plays for
the puppet theater stage over four decades, from Yotsugi Soga (The Soga
Heir), in 1683, to Kanhasshu tsunagi uma (The Tethered Steed of the Eight
Provinces), which was staged in the first lunar month of 1724. As mentioned
earlier, the 1685 Shusse Kagekiyo, Chikamatsu’s first play composed for the
reciter Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), who had opened his own theater (on
Osaka’s Dotombori Avenue) in 1684, marks the boundary between “old
jōruri” and “new jōruri.” The “new jōruri” signaled a new era in ningyō
jōruri in terms not only of playwriting but also of performance and staging.
Today, Chikamatsu’s reputation rests largely on his sewa-
mono (contemporary-life plays), even though roughly three-fourths of his
total jōruri production were jidai-mono (period or historical pieces). During
his four decades as a playwright, Chikamatsu also devoted himself almost
exclusively to writing kabuki plays for Kyoto’s Miyako no Mandayū theater
in the years 1693–1702, crafting roles to showcase the actor Sakata Tōjūrō I.
Chikamatsu’s jōruri plays that are most celebrated today all emerged after
this kabuki period.
Changes in Chikamatsu’s approach to the worlds depicted in his plays over
the years provide an effective means of considering his creative productivity.
That is, the fictional universes of his period plays are inherently linked to their
themes of political rebellion, vengeance, and so forth. For example, his
twelve plays based on Soga monogatari all revolve around a vendetta. On
the other hand, his nine plays based on the Genpei War (between the Genji
and Heike houses) and seven plays based on Gikeiki (Chronicle of Yoshitsune)
tend to rework familiar plots found in their respective sources. His corpus
also includes five plays based on Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace), five on

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Minamoto Raikō and his Four Guardian Kings, and three plays about the
historical figure Coxinga (1624–62).
Chikamatsu’s career can be roughly divided into three main phases. In the
first decade, his jōruri corpus is similar to that of ko-jōruri; that is, his early
plays also drew heavily on pre-Tokugawa narratives. However, he began
experimenting with the strategy, embryonic but evident in Kinpira jōruri, of
portraying current events within the guise of a period piece. For example,
Chikamatsu wrote one of the first theatrical treatments of the 1703 vendetta
by the Akō rōnin: the three-act period piece Goban Taiheiki (Chronicle of
Great Peace, Played on a Go Board, 1710). To avoid the shogunal ban on
literary or theatrical treatment of politically sensitive topics, Chikamatsu
employed the fictional universe of the military romance Taiheiki, mapping
each historical vendetta participant onto an existing Taiheiki character. Most
subsequent jōruri – culminating in the most celebrated version, Kanadehon
Chūshingura (Treasury of Loyal Retainers, 1748) – also set their plots in the
same fictional universe. Predating the use of the word sekai (world) as a
theatrical term, Chikamatsu played an instrumental role in establishing the
conventions for the casting, settings, and tropes of later theatrical “worlds.”
The shinjū-mono (love suicide play), a contemporary-life play that recounted
the recent tragedy of a double suicide, had been in vogue on kabuki stages since
1683. Chikamatsu wrote the first shinjū-mono for jōruri, Sonezaki shinjū (Love
Suicides at Sonezaki), in 1703. Ningyō jōruri images from the 1600s typically
portray only the puppets, each operated by a single puppeteer, above a
shoulder-high curtain stretched across the stage’s width, behind which all the
performers – reciter, musician, and puppeteers – remained concealed from the
audience. An illustration in the playbill for Sonezaki shinjū, printed in conjunc-
tion with the play’s opening night, however, depicts the puppeteer’s body
revealed behind a rail as he operates a female puppet, with both the reciter and
the musician seated on stage left. Chikamatsu’s Sonezaki shinjū also trans-
formed the puppet theater, which had previously only staged period pieces.
Chikamatsu’s exposure to kabuki dramaturgy profoundly affected his approach
to playwriting and later greatly influenced his jōruri composition. In his post-
kabuki years, Chikamatsu’s period pieces are more likely to include an act or
scene that is very obviously about the present. Around the same time, more-
over, the Takemoto Theater began incorporating more visual spectacle into its
stage productions. For these reasons, the 1703 Sonezaki shinjū can be considered
as having triggered the playwright’s middle phase, the years when he began
writing plays about contemporary life that featured commoners and experi-
menting with the inclusion of contemporary elements in his period pieces.

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Puppetry took on greater importance from 1705, when Takeda Izumo

(d. 1747) took over management of the Takemoto Theater, freeing
Takemoto Gidayū to focus on oral recitation and performance, and hired
Chikamatsu as staff playwright. The new emphasis on visual spectacle gave
jōruri access to a wider spectrum of the urban population – particularly those
who could not assimilate the recitation of Chikamatsu’s dense literary prose.
Previously, Takemoto Theater performances consisted solely of puppeteers
each operating a single puppet, the reciter, and the samisen player. In late
1705, however, the first collaborative effort between puppeteer/manager,
reciter, and playwright resulted in Yōmei Tennō shokunin kagami (Emperor
Yōmei and the Mirror of Artisans). This five-act period piece profoundly
changed the Takemoto Theater’s staging practices and widened its audience
base by enhanced visual spectacle, exploiting the Takeda family’s forte of
larger, more lifelike puppets, lavish use of stage props, and karakuri (mechan-
ized puppets).
From 1710, the Takemoto Theater faced serious competition from another
jōruri theater in Osaka for the first time when the reciter Toyotake Wakatayū
(1681–1764), a former disciple of Gidayū, opened the Toyotake Theater,
choosing the Osaka-born Ki no Kaion (1663–1742) as staff playwright. For
the next thirteen years or so, the two rival puppet theaters and their staff
playwrights introduced the Osaka theater scene to an artistic rivalry of
unprecedented intensity. During this period, which represented the last
thirteen years of Chikamatsu’s career but the entirety of Kaion’s active period
as a jōruri playwright, Chikamatsu produced slightly over half of his entire
jōruri corpus of 56 plays (14 sewa-mono and 42 jidai-mono), whereas the less
experienced Kaion produced 45 plays (11 sewa-mono and 34 jidai-mono).
When the shogunate banned the staging of shinjū-mono in 1723,
Chikamatsu retired within the same year and Ki no Kaion soon followed
suit. Their retirement created a void at their respective theaters that would
eventually usher in a new age of collaborative authorship.
All of Chikamatsu’s most celebrated jōruri were composed after his return
from the kabuki theater. Modern Japanese anthologies of his plays devote
their annotation efforts almost exclusively to his late-period plays. Moreover,
if you wished to view the performance of a Chikamatsu play today, you
would similarly have to choose among his sewa-mono plays (1703 onward)
and his period plays from roughly that same period. There seems to be little
interest in reviving his earlier jōruri, whereas his plays that became hits in
their own time continue to be popular today. For example, at least one act of
Komochi yamauba (Motherly Mountain Witch, 1712) – a fictional interweaving

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of legends about Minamoto Raikō and the mountain witch – has been
performed at least every decade since its premier. Kokusen’ya kassen (The
Battles of Coxinga, 1715) enjoyed an unprecedentedly long run of seventeen
months after its debut and is still performed today. Among his sewa-mono,
Shinjū Ten-no-Amijima (Love Suicides at Amijima, 1720) is considered his
masterpiece. Another popular jōruri is Meido no hikyaku (Courier for Hell,
1711), which can sometimes be viewed during the same season as its later
kabuki adaptation, Koibikyaku Yamato ōrai (A Message of Love from Yamato,
1757). In addition to pitting social duty against individual sentiment, the
contemporary-life plays demonstrate the powerful social impact exerted by
money on the daily lives of the merchant class.
Nevertheless, the modern staging of a Chikamatsu jōruri requires certain
adjustments. His prose tends to include or omit syllables to achieve rhythmic
recitation, making his narratives harder to recite. Moreover, his plays were
designed for staging by one-puppeteer puppets. The subsequent shift to
three-puppeteer puppets subtly changed the balance between sound and
spectacle. Chikamatsu’s plays thus require some revision to accommodate
the greater expressive range of the subsequent three-puppeteer puppets.

The golden age

The golden age of jōruri, spanning the years from 1715 until 1751, opened with
the first performance of Kokusen’ya kassen, which enjoyed an unprecedented
seventeen-month run at the Takemoto Theater. Takemoto Gidayū died in
1714, and Kokusen’ya kassen was Chikamatsu’s first play composed for
Gidayū’s twenty-three-year-old artistic heir, in a bid to lure back audiences
who had strayed to the Toyotake Theater’s still youthful but more artistically
mature Toyotake Wakatayū. The prolific production of the two staff play-
wrights of the Takemoto and Toyotake theaters between 1710 and 1723
contributed to jōruri’s overwhelming popularity, which overshadowed that
of kabuki during this period. Other factors contributing to the popularity of
jōruri were the shogunal ban on erotic literature in 1722 and the ban on
theatrical shinjū-mono in 1723, causing fiction and kabuki to lose ground to
jōruri. Due to the growing prosperity of Osaka as the country’s economic
hub, jōruri attracted a more affluent audience. Kabuki theaters also relied on
jōruri scripts in the absence of popular playwrights of their own. Another
factor was the establishment of a system of collaborative jōruri authorship.
This golden age finds Chikamatsu at his artistic peak, taking greater risks as
he creatively interwove existing fictional universes, classical and

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contemporary prose and poetry, contemporary social events, and allusions to

other theatrical performances. Keisei Shimabara kairu kassen (Shimabara
Courtesans and the Toad War, 1719), for example, assumes the temporal
setting and many of the characters of the fictional universe of The Tale of the
Soga Brothers, the popular tale of two brothers’ vendetta against their father’s
killer. This period piece, however, functioned as a thinly disguised narrative
of the events leading up to and during the 1637–8 Shimabara Uprising.
The staging of the performers continued to evolve. A 1727 stage illustration
of Hōjō jirai ki (The Chronicle of Hōjō Tokiyori), first performed at the
Toyotake Theater in 1726, shows the reciter and the musician seated at the far
edge of stage right (allowing more space on stage for puppets) and a railing
that concealed only the lower half of the puppeteers’ bodies, suggesting a
shift from puppetry in which puppeteers remained entirely concealed below
a railing on stage to a new form of puppetry in which both the puppets and
the upper half of the puppeteers’ bodies were visible above the railing.
In contrast to the larger puppets used in Emperor Yōmei and the Mirror of
Artisans in 1705, small puppets used in The Battles of Coxinga from 1715 created a
sense of faraway distance when juxtaposed with the normal-sized puppets in
the foreground. Documents reveal that puppets with movable mouths, eye-
lids, and hand joints appeared in 1727, movable eyes in 1730, movable fingers
in 1733, and movable eyebrows in 1736; by 1748–51, three-person puppetry
(sannin-zukai) had become the mainstream. This new type of puppet
achieved realistic movement through seamless coordination among the
“main puppeteer” (omozukai), who operated the puppet’s head and right
arm, the “left puppeteer” (hidarizukai), who operated the left arm, and the
“feet puppeteer” (ashizukai), the most junior of the trio.
The golden age ended with the death of Namiki Sōsuke (1695–1751). This
influential jōruri playwright was initially affiliated with the Toyotake
Theater, left Osaka for Edo in 1741, wrote for Osaka’s kabuki scene from
1742 until 1744, and then ultimately joined the Takemoto Theater in 1745.
Under the name of Namiki Senryū I, Namiki collaborated with fellow play-
wrights Miyoshi Shōraku and Takeda Izumo II (Koizumo I) to produce their
first piece, the contemporary-life play Natsu matsuri Naniwa kagami (Summer
Festival: Mirror of Osaka) that same year. As Namiki Sōsuke, he and the same
two collaborators co-authored what are considered “the three jōruri master-
pieces,” all performed today in both the ningyō jōruri and the kabuki
theaters: Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the Secrets of
Calligraphy, 1746), Yoshitsune senbon zakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand
Cherry Trees, 1747), and Kanadehon Chūshingura in 1748. By the mid 1700s,

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ningyō jōruri had established most of the conventions of playwriting, staging,

and puppetry in practice today.
The twelve-scene, nine-act period piece Sugawara denju tenarai kagami was
set in the Heian period, and recounts the life of court aristocrat and scholar
Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), beginning with his exile to Dazaifū in
southern Japan due to unjust slander up to his deification at Kyoto’s Kitano
Shrine. The play combines fact and popular legend about the life of this
illustrious figure whose son ultimately inherits his court position. The most
popular scenes in the play, however, feature three brothers – sons of
Michizane’s trusted retainer but currently the loyal retainers of different
political factions at court – and the profound sacrifices they make to uphold
their fealty to the Sugawara and to atone for past transgressions.
Yoshitsune senbon zakura is a fifteen-scene, five-act period piece that takes
place after the end of the Genpei War, when Yoshitsune and his small band of
retainers are being hunted down by the troops of his brother Minamoto
Yoritomo. Though primarily based on familiar legends surrounding
Yoshitsune, his loyal vassals, and his lover Shizuka Gozen, the famous third
act involves a minor thug and his father who runs a roadside sushi shop.
Through a series of complicated plot twists and revealed identities, these men
and their families coincidentally collaborate to save the life of the last living
member of the Taira house.
Kanadehon Chūshingura is a theatrical account of the Akō vendetta in which
forty-seven rōnin formerly affiliated with the Akō domain in western Japan
planned for roughly two years to avenge the death of their lord, Asano
Naganori. The Akō vendetta ranks alongside the 1193 vendetta of the Soga
Brothers to avenge their father’s death and the 1634 vendetta of Iga Pass as the
three best-known in Japanese history. Chikamatsu Monzaemon was the first
to stage a jōruri on the historical Akō incident in 1710, avoiding shogunal
censorship by setting it in the fictional universe of Taiheiki, a temporal
convention that would be adopted by subsequent treatments of the Akō
vendetta. The only version still regularly performed today is the 1748
Kanadehon Chūshingura.
Two other plays also enjoyed tremendous popularity in the post-
Chikamatsu years. The military romance The Tales of the Heike first gave
form to the tale of the death of Taira Atsumori at the hands of Minamoto
warrior Kumagai Jirō Naozane during the Taira–Minamoto war (1180–5). Since
then, narrative sequels and variations of the short episode have been subse-
quently retold in fourteenth-century noh, late medieval Muromachi fiction,
illustrated handscrolls, and sixteenth-century kōwakamai. The five-act period

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piece Ichinotani futaba gunki (Chronicle of the Battle of Ichinotani, 1751) was co-
authored by Asada Itchō, Namioka Geiji, Namiki Shōza I, Naniwa Sanzō,
Toyotake Jinroku, and Namiki Sōsuke. This play adds the tragic twist of a
substitution into the familiar tale of Atsumori’s death: Kumagai’s sadness over
having being compelled to slay Atsumori is thus compounded by his revelation
that he had, in fact, substituted his only son for Atsumori and beheaded him at
Suma Bay.
Also a period piece, the ten-act Iga-goe dōchū sugoroku (Through Iga Pass
with the Tōkaidō Board Game, 1783) was composed by Chikamatsu Hanji
(1725–83) and Chikamatsu Kasaku. It reflects the theatergoers’ interest in plays
about incidents occurring closer to their own times. The vendetta of Iga Pass
refers to the slaying of Watanabe Gentayū by fellow Okayama samurai
Kawai Matagorō in 1630, followed by the subsequent vendetta against
Matagorō in the vicinity of Iga Pass in 1634 by Gentayū’s older brother
Watanabe Kazuma and his brother-in-law, Araki Mataemon, who gained
legendary status as a swordsman as a result of his part in the vendetta. To
avoid censorship, the play was crafted as a period piece set in the early
seventeenth century with slightly changed names. Today, the most fre-
quently performed scenes are “Numazu” (Act VI) and “Okazaki” (Act VIII),
both fictional additions to the actual historical incident but the focus of the
greatest tragic intensity in their portrayal of the profound personal sacrifices
that the vendetta ultimately demanded.
All five of the above jōruri were adapted for the kabuki stage soon after
their debuts and have since become some of the most popular plays in the
kabuki repertoire. All are period pieces but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the acts
which have remained popular over the centuries are the fictionalized scenes,
moments of high tragic intensity that highlight how duty can only be fulfilled
at the cost of great personal sacrifice, such as the death of the fictional Kanpei
in Act VI of Kanadehon Chūshingura. The popularity of jōruri declined after
Namiki’s death in 1751, which coincided with the deaths of other prominent
jōruri artists, ushering in a kabuki revival during the 1760s. Perhaps not
surprisingly, Namiki Shōza (also read Shōzō, 1730–73) – one of the leading
playwrights during this kabuki revival – had earlier studied jōruri composi-
tion under Namiki Sōsuke.
The most popular jōruri drew inspiration from contemporary events,
political incidents, and other topics that were simultaneously being explored
through the performing arts of kabuki and oral storytelling (kōdan), texts such
as block-printed illustrated fiction or “historical accounts” that circulated as
handwritten manuscripts (jitsuroku), and visual media of polychrome ukiyo-e

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prints. Jōruri performances interpreted recent events and familiar legends in a

form that combined visual spectacle, lush literary prose, and the most
contemporary slang, while leaving behind a wealth of theatrical texts:
jōruribon that attempted to authentically capture all the musical nuances of
the tayū’s recitation, and also image-intensive illustrated digests, jōruri ezu-
kushi, that relied on images and terse theatrical information to narrate a play’s
plot. In these ways, jōruri evolved into a theatrical form that produced
cultural artifacts that were immersed in and shared characteristics with the
literary and visual cultures of Tokugawa Japan.

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 45
From the beginnings of kabuki to the
playwrights Nanboku and Mokuami
satoko shimazaki

The origin of kabuki is often traced to a woman named Okuni who called
herself a “shrine priestess from Izumo” and presented performances in male
dress in various locations in Kyoto, among them the imperial palace and the
dry riverbed of the Kamo River, and eventually even at the shogun’s castle in
Edo. While reliable documentation relating to Okuni is scarce, numerous
fictionalized accounts circulated during the Tokugawa period. Roughly half a
century after Okuni lived, the Kyoto writer Asai Ryōi wrote about the
beginnings of the kabuki theater in his Tōkaidō meishoki (Famous Places of
the Tōkaidō, c. 1660): “Once upon a time, kabuki began in Kyoto with the
shrine priestess of Izumo called Okuni, who performed yayako-odori (a girl’s
dance) at the edge of a bridge in eastern Gojō.” Books about kabuki published
in the eighteenth century by the Kyoto publishing house Hachimonjiya,
including Tada Nanrei’s Shinsen kokon yakusha taizen (New Accounts of
Ancient and Modern Actors, 1750) and Tamenaga Itchō’s Kabuki jishi (The
Origin and Basics of Kabuki, 1751), invariably open their accounts of kabuki
history with references to Okuni’s dance. In Kabuki jishi, Okuni’s legendary
stature is emphasized by the tears Yūki Hideyasu, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s son, is
said to have shed when he saw her dance: “While there are tens of millions of
women in Japan, this woman is the only one people call ‘the first woman in
all the land’ (tenka ni hitori no onna).”
In the Tokugawa period, the legend of Okuni was featured most promi-
nently in books published in the Kamigata region, which centered on Kyoto
and Osaka. Kabuki developed along a very different trajectory in Edo, the
administrative seat of the shogunate, and accounts of kabuki published there
tried to present a distinctly local theatrical history by portraying Saruwaka
(Nakamura) Kanzaburō (1598–1658) – an actor and founder of the Nakamura
Theater, the most important venue for kabuki in Edo – as the progenitor of
the form in that city. By the late eighteenth century, texts such as Yakusha

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meibutsu sode nikki (The Notable Journal of Kabuki Actors, 1771), Shibai
noriaibanashi (Writings on Gathering at the Theater, c. 1800), and Sazareishi
(History and Records of the Three Theaters, 1803) crafted narratives of the
origins of Edo kabuki that consciously departed from the established
Kamigata-centric Hachimonjiya-based theater histories, through which the
history of kabuki came to be understood in the modern period. Terakado
Seiken’s (1796–1868) Edo hanjōki (Prosperous Tales of Edo, 1832–6), published
in Edo, also explains that kabuki began in Edo during the Kan’ei period
(1624–36) when the actor Saruwaka Kanzaburō was ordered by the shogunate
to open the first theater in Nakabashi-chō.
In considering the broader history of kabuki, it is best to contextualize
Okuni’s cross-dressing performance in the context of the urban practice of
furyū, which was centered in Kyoto but spread around the country. Furyū
refers to a kind of participatory, festival-like performance in which crowds of
people decked themselves out in gorgeous costumes and went out to dance
in the streets, accompanied by music; common in the late medieval period, it
was associated with Buddhist rituals and festivals rooted in goryō shinkō – a
belief that the angry spirits of the dead needed to be pacified and transformed
into protective guardians of the community. In Kyoto during the Muromachi
period (1392–1573), members of different classes competed to see who could
dress up in the most extravagant costumes (including cross-dressing, the
adoption by aristocrats of lower-class dress, and the wearing of lavish foreign
clothes or animal costumes). Eventually, professional stage troupes with
equally extravagant costumes began to emerge, and these troupes – which
specialized in everything from male acrobatics to girls’ and “kabuki” dances
(here kabuki refers to the rough, eccentric outlaws known as kabuki-mono
who wandered the streets, feeling out of place after the end of the long civil
war) – began changing what was originally a participatory ritual into produc-
tions to be viewed. Okuni, who started out as just one of many performers,
was elevated to the status of a legend because her dances, centered on the
figure of the kabuki-mono, were so fresh and contemporary. Whether in
Kamigata or in Edo, kabuki inherited the spirit of rituals and festivals: the
licensed theaters in all three cities might be thought of as venues for a sort of
routinized festival atmosphere outside of everyday experience.
During the first half of the seventeenth century, kabuki comprised a much
broader range of performance arts than it does today: it consisted of dances
and short skits by troupes featuring various types of performers, including
women, professional courtesans, and boy acrobats. Around 1629, the shogu-
nate began regulating courtesans’ kabuki, detaching brothels and the

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courtesans who worked in them from the theater business and confining
them to the licensed pleasure quarters. Eventually, in 1652, the government
issued restrictions on troupes of young boys, which had also been linked to
prostitution. This restriction, enforced in Edo, posed a serious challenge to
kabuki, but the form managed to survive by quickly shifting to yarō kabuki
(men’s kabuki), which featured actors whose pates had been shaven, as was
the practice with men over fifteen years old, after the coming-of-age cere-
mony. This made it difficult for actors to attract audience members with their
youthful appearance. The gradual transition to yarō kabuki in both regions
resulted in a shift away from kabuki focused on dance to plot-driven plays,
eventually leading to the emergence of playwrights, specialized role types
and acting patterns, and the gradual formation of a cyclic annual calendar
unique to kabuki. Kabuki as it is studied in classrooms today gradually began
to take shape around the end of the sixteenth century, during what is known
as the “long Genroku period,” which lasted roughly from 1684 to 1711.
Kabuki developed distinct styles and traditions in the three major cities:
Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Sakusha shikihō kezairoku (Notes on Playmaking,
1801), a nineteenth-century text on kabuki playmaking by Nyūgatei Ganyū
(probably the pen-name of the Osaka playwright Namiki Shōza II), offers a
thumbnail sketch of the differences in styles:
People in Kyoto are mild by nature, and in accordance with their sensibilities,
for a long time now, about 60 percent of their plays have been dedicated to
love affairs; the plots are too mild and somewhat lacking in force. They are
like beautiful women. If plays were people, they would be the skin.
People in Edo are rough by nature, and in accordance with their sensibilities,
for a long time now, their plays have been focused on grand historical drama,
70 percent cutting down and throwing people – all very silly; the plots are
rather stiff and do not appeal to women. They are like a samurai. If plays
were people, they would be the bones.
People in Osaka are reasonable by nature, and in accordance with their
sensibilities, for a long time now, about 80 percent of our plays have centered
on giri (moral obligation); the plots are often too forced and sometimes bore
the audience. Osaka plays are like chivalrous commoners (otokodate). If plays
were people, they would be the flesh.1

1
Nyūgatei Ganyū (Namiki Shōza II?), Sakusha shikihō kezairoku, in Kinsei geidōron, ed.
Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Watanabe Ichirō, and Gunji Masakatsu (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1972), 511. A translation of Kezairoku is included in Saltzman-Li, Creating Kabuki
Plays.

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Early kabuki in Edo and Kamigata shared common plot elements, as

illustrated by one pattern characteristic of both regions, one that centered on
the depiction of a man visiting a teahouse and having an affair with a courtesan
(keiseikai). By the Genroku period, kabuki theaters in each of the three major
cities were developing “sequential acts” (tsuzuki kyōgen) suited to the specific
tastes of their local audiences. Edo was characterized by its large samurai
population, especially during the first century of its existence; thus, Edo kabuki
tended to be “rough” and “historical” and incorporated elements that made it
feel “like a samurai.” Specifically, plays often drew on various historical plots
derived from military chronicles such as the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace,
c. 1370). During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, many star
actors of Edo kabuki, including Nakamura Denkurō I (1662–1713) and Ichikawa
Danjūrō I (1660–1704), played characters that allowed them to showcase the
power and strength of young samurai. Danjūrō’s acting style eventually
produced what is known as aragoto (the rough style). In Edo, these rough
samurai characters such as Soga Gorō were characterized by bold red strokes of
makeup on their faces, small strips of paper tied into their hair to indicate
strength, and powerful stamping of their feet.
In contrast to plays in Edo, those in Kyoto and Osaka from the same period
focused much more on tightly structured social dramas set in contemporary
times, often in what is known as the oie sōdō (household disturbance) plot, in
which a daimyō household faces a crisis that threatens to destroy it but that is
eventually averted. The clear distinction between Osaka and Kyoto kabuki
mentioned in Kezairoku is a phenomenon of the mid-eighteenth century.
During the Genroku period, Osaka kabuki theaters frequently imported hit
plays from Kyoto. A typical household disturbance plot would feature the
young heir of a daimyō household who loses his status as a result of some
intrigue or on account of his indulgences in the pleasure quarters, and thus
goes into hiding, disguising himself as a commoner. The heir remains caught
in a limbo for some time, perhaps torn between a courtesan and his fiancée,
but is eventually able to reconcile his relationships and return to his position
of power, thanks to the selfless efforts of his attendants. Such plots can be
understood as an early modern version – both popularized and eroticized – of
the “noble in exile” (kishu ryūritan) pattern so familiar from classical tales such
as Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, eleventh century), and in terms of
what Andrew Gerstle has described as the “cyclic imagination,” in which the
ending of a narrative brings its audience back to the beginning. The acting
style used to portray naïve, amorous youth in Kamigata kabuki was later
given the name wagoto (the soft style), and the Genroku period star Sakata

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Tōjūrō (1647–1709) came retrospectively to be known as its creator, yielding a

history paralleling Danjūrō’s creation of aragoto and thus highlighting the
contrast between kabuki in Kamigata and Edo. Aragoto and wagoto were,
however, only two of many acting patterns that arose from the Genroku
kabuki plot structure.
As plots based in military history or on familiar household disturbances
were repeatedly staged over time, they came to be known as sekai, or
“worlds” – sets of characters and relationships that could be endlessly evoked,
given tweaks known as shukō each time. In late seventeenth-century Kyoto,
productions began including a sewa kyōgen (contemporary play) dealing with
a sensational event such as a love suicide as a separate act within the overall
drama. During the eighteenth century, kabuki plays in both Edo and
Kamigata came to be made up of a historical part, jidai kyōgen, and a
contemporary part. The division between the two categories was sharper
in Kyoto and Osaka, where from the early eighteenth century onwards
theaters started staging contemporary plays independently from the larger
historical sekai that governed the production as a whole. Theaters in Edo
continued to maintain the link between the contemporary acts and the larger
historical sekai until well into the nineteenth century.
From the 1710s to the 1730s, all three cities saw the establishment of an
annual kabuki calendar, an all-day production structure, and various laws
relating to actors’ contracts and the operation of the theaters. In the case of
Edo, four theaters were licensed by the government by the middle of the
seventeenth century, though the so-called Ejima Ikushima incident (1714),
which revealed a long-standing sexual relationship between the head atten-
dant in the shogun’s inner chambers and a kabuki actor, resulted in the
closure of the Yamamura Theater, leaving the Nakamura, Ichimura, and
Morita theaters as the only licensed venues for kabuki. Only when one of
these three main theaters found itself financially incapable of producing plays
could its production rights be relegated to its designated backup theater
(hikae yagura).
In comparison to its Kamigata counterparts, Edo kabuki left few textual
traces – at least in the form of scripts. Productions were extremely fluid, and
could either keep developing freely during a particular production or be
abruptly terminated if a production’s popularity waned. Playwriting was all
about showcasing the actors and their specialties while creating new twists
on established materials and following the conventions associated with a
particular production. New casts that had contracted with each theater for
the upcoming theatrical year would be announced in “face-showing

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playbills” (kaomise banzuke) shortly before the “face-showing production” of

the Eleventh Month, which inaugurated the theatrical year. The announce-
ment of these new groupings of actors and of the sekai that would be used in
their first productions was a big event that stirred up excitement throughout
the city. Following the face-showing production was the second most impor-
tant production of the year: the hatsuharu kyōgen, or the “first spring produc-
tion,” which opened in the First Month and was expected to continue until
the Fifth Month. This production consisted of a long string of acts based in
the sekai of the Soga brothers’ revenge; it would open with a historical act to
which contemporary acts, also based in the Soga sekai, would gradually be
added. This technique of linking contemporary and historical was one of Edo
kabuki’s basic mechanisms, and is known as naimaze (jumbling), referring to
the fusion of past and present. The famous play Sukeroku, featuring the Edo
dandy of the same name – actually the historical Soga Gorō in disguise –
started out not as the scripted, self-contained text familiar today, but as one of
the contemporary acts staged each year during cherry-blossom season as part
of this long production.
There were a few months of the year when relatively fixed tōshi kyōgen
(whole plays) could be created and staged, notably the nagori kyōgen (farewell
production) of the Ninth Month, but apart from these exceptions, Edo
productions continued to shift and evolve over time. It is not a surprise to
find that the Edo playwright Nakamura Jūsuke II (1749–1803), reflecting on
the history of kabuki in the early nineteenth century, commented that it was
considered embarrassing to use preexisting plays that had been written for
the puppet stage: these productions, known as ichiya-zuke (“overnight
pickles”), indicated that a playwright had failed to keep his production rolling.
Playwrights in Kyoto and Osaka produced plays in a very different climate:
in these two cities, multi-act plays were staged in their entirety, in fairly fixed
form, rather than morph over time as in Edo. It is worth noting, in this
connection, that many major eighteenth-century kabuki playwrights from
Kyoto and Osaka were trained in both kabuki and puppet theater. Plays for
the puppet theater tend to be much more linguistically sophisticated and
structurally coherent than kabuki plays, and their scripts were printed and
read widely throughout the Tokugawa period. Perhaps due to this difference
in theatrical orientation, kabuki scripts from Kyoto and Osaka have survived
in much larger quantities. The Kamigata kabuki calendar was similar to
Edo’s, but here, too, the differences in the audiences’ tastes were evident.
The Kamigata calendar also began with a festive face-showing production in
the Eleventh Month, but, in contrast to Edo, it was the production that

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opened in the First Month, called ni no kawari (the second production), that
was the most important production of the year. The ni no kawari production
was typically a household disturbance play and included a scene set in the
pleasure quarters. The early part of the eighteenth century was a rocky time
for Kamigata kabuki, and the licensed theaters continued to decrease in
number until Kyoto and Osaka were operating for the most part with only
two theaters each.
Many of the historical kabuki plays that remain famous today were
adapted from puppet plays: examples include works from Chikamatsu
Monzaemon’s Kokusen’ya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga, 1715) to Takeda
Izumo and Namiki Senryū’s Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the
Secrets of Calligraphy, 1746), Yoshitsune senbon zakura (Yoshitsune and the
Thousand Cherry Trees, 1747), and the Kanadehon chūshingura (The Treasury
of Loyal Retainers, 1748). But while the puppet theater’s influence on kabuki
was considerable in all three cities, it left an especially deep mark in Kamigata.
Jōrurifu (The Puppet Play Score, c. 1801), a guide to the puppet theater
published in Osaka, speaks of the popularity of the form in both Kyoto and
Osaka during the mid eighteenth century: “the puppet theater increases its
popularity and kabuki is almost non-existent.”2 Kabuki in Kamigata was
indeed overshadowed by the puppet theater during this time, and only
gradually regained its vigor through the adaptation of hit puppet plays.
By the latter half of the eighteenth century, Osaka kabuki began thriving
again as a result of new innovations by talented playwrights trained in the
puppet theater: Namiki Shōza (Shōzō), and his disciples Namiki Gohei
(1747–1808) and Nagawa Kamesuke (active 1772–89). These Osaka playwrights
created dynamic plays featuring spectacular displays of evil that would later
influence plays by the famous Edo playwright Tsuruya Nanboku IV
(1755–1829). While Kamigata kabuki continued to be rooted in household
disturbances, the focus of the plays shifted. After the Genroku period focus on
wagoto, Osaka kabuki began developing more heroic male leads (tachiyaku)
during the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the century, Namiki Shōza
began producing dynamic rebellion plays, muhon-nin geki, featuring the
attempt of a villain to take over Japan and overturn its political structure.
He also introduced innovations such as the rotating stage (mawari butai) and
the trap lift (seriage), which could move up and down while carrying several
actors. These new devices made it possible to stage spectacular rebellion

2
Author unknown, Jōrurifu, in Enseki jisshu 3, ed. Iwamoto Kattōshi (Tokyo: Chūō
Kōronsha, 1979), 192.

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plays such as Tenjiku Tokubei kikigaki ōrai (Records of Tokubei from India,
1757) and Sanjikkoku yofune no hajimari (Thirty Bushels of Rice and the Night
Boat’s Beginning, 1758). In addition to continuing in Shōza’s footsteps in
Kinmon gosan no kiri (The Golden Gate and the Paulownia Crest, 1778), the
playwright Namiki Gohei introduced fresh contemporary plays featuring
murder and the sensational partings of two lovers.
The history of kabuki is a history of actors. During the eighteenth century,
Edo kabuki gave rise to a lineage of important stage names such as Ichikawa
Danjūrō and Matsumoto Kōshirō; these names were inherited generation
after generation, with each successive actor adding new twists to the acting
tradition and the roles that became his with the name. The creation of these
lineages of actors and the transmission of acting patterns through particular
stage names was less prominent in Kamigata, where even important names
such as Yoshizawa Ayame and Sakata Tōjūrō could be discontinued. In the
early eighteenth century, Edo theaters lacked female-role actors with the
sophistication of those active in Kyoto and often brought them to Edo to
perform – a situation that changed when Segawa Kikunojō III (1751–1810)
moved to Edo in the mid eighteenth century and with the establishment of
the Iwai Hanshirō lineage. Such interactions and exchanges became promi-
nent in the mid eighteenth century. Osaka rebellion plays also served as a
fertile ground for the cultivation of specialists in villainous roles (jitsuaku)
such as Nakayama Shinkurō I (1702–75), Nakamura Utaemon I (1714–91), and
Arashi Hinasuke I (1741–96), whose techniques were later brought to Edo.
The nineteenth century is characterized by the breakdown of the conven-
tional theater system that had been established during the eighteenth cen-
tury, and by the emergence of new production styles. In the late eighteenth
century, Kamigata theaters began collaborating with each other as Osaka
actors participated in the face-showing production in Kyoto, then returned to
Osaka to act in the ni no kawari production. The annual contracts that tied
actors to theaters collapsed, and actors began working under two-month
temporary contracts. This period also witnessed the emergence of numerous
small theaters featuring child actors and relatively young actors (kodomo
shibai and chū shibai); these came to serve as a training ground for young
actors, bringing exciting new changes to the theatrical world, but at the same
time it exposed theaters in Kamigata to increased competition.
Edo kabuki during the mid to late eighteenth century was characterized by
the dynamic, witty historical plays of Sakurada Jisuke (1734–1806), which shared
the spirit of contemporary popular literature centered on the pleasure quarters
and represented by the early kibyōshi (yellow covers) genre. Playmaking

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conventions underwent significant changes when Namiki Gohei, the star

Kamigata playwright, was hired away to Edo. He brought with him the
more tightly structured playmaking style and also began producing contem-
porary plays separate from the historical worlds to which Edo plays had
conventionally been bound. Theaters suffered financial difficulties from the
late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and in 1793 for the first time all
three of Edo’s theaters were unable to stage their face-showing productions;
they had to close temporarily and entrust their production rights to their back-
up theaters. Tsuruya Nanboku IV produced hits during this financially unstable
period when the traditions of Edo kabuki were starting to collapse. His
grotesque and humorous plays featured lower-class characters, murder, and
ghosts, and incorporated special effects and motifs from side shows, most
famously in Tenjiku Tokubei ikokubanashi (The Tale of Tokubei from India,
1804) and Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan (Tōkaidō, Ghost Stories at Yotsuya, 1825).
These plays were the product of the early nineteenth century, when conven-
tional plays were no longer feasible. The price for seats rose during the
nineteenth century, but Nanboku found ways to stage cheap productions
during the summer months when major actors were usually on vacation.
These changes transformed the face of Edo kabuki, and writers, actors, and
those involved in the theater became interested in producing histories of
kabuki and began canonizing acting lines and their past repertoires, as is
evident in Ichikawa Danjūrō VII’s selection of the so-called Kabuki jūhachiban
(Eighteen Classics of Kabuki, 1832).
During the Tenpō reforms (1841–3) the forced relocation of the theaters to
the then rural area of Asakusa that came to be known as Saruwaka-machi had
an even more profound effect on Edo kabuki. Kabuki in Saruwaka-machi was
characterized by the production of plays that continued and expanded upon
Nanboku’s earlier experiments. The playwright Mimasuya Nisōji (1785–1856)
notes the end of the once all-important ritual of selecting a sekai for the face-
showing production in Kabuki shūdan (Collected Essays on Kabuki, 1851), where
he writes that “for the past twenty years, there has been no sekai.”3 Writers
who came after Nanboku such as Segawa Jokō III (1806–81) and Kawatake
Mokuami (1816–93) moved away from the conventional sekai, drawing heavily
on contemporary social drama taken from oral storytelling (kōdan and rakugo).
In comparison with Nanboku’s dynamic depictions of evil, which he had
inherited from Osaka rebellion plays, kabuki in this age turned its attention

3
Mimasuya Nisōji, Kabuki shūdan (1851), manuscript at the Historiographical Institute of
the University of Tokyo, 41873, last page [unpaginated].

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 satoko shimazaki

to the plight of much smaller-scale, true-to-life human figures who found

themselves living lives of crime or confronting inescapable situations.
Segawa Jokō, for instance, brought the farmer martyr Sakura Sōgorō to stage
in his Higashiyama Sakura no sōshi (The Book of the Martyr Sakura, 1851), one of
a number of what were known as momen shibai (“cotton plays”) because of the
bleak costumes used for peasants. Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93) produced a
series of shiranami-mono (bandit plays) featuring contemporary, low-class crim-
inals without any secret warrior lineage to connect them to the larger historical
imaginary worlds that had dominated Edo kabuki for so long.
Narratives of nineteenth-century kabuki tend to center on Edo because,
during the Meiji period, after Edo became Tokyo, what had once existed as a
local form (particular to specific cities) came to be reinvented as a national
theatrical tradition. The history of kabuki has also been shaped by the
modern canonization of Tsuruya Nanboku and Kawatake Mokuami,
whose celebrity gives the impression that the nineteenth century was a
highpoint of early modern kabuki. Viewed in the larger trajectory of early
modern theater history, however, the nineteenth century was a period of
financial crisis when kabuki was starting to lose its privileged cultural place in
the three main cities and had begun seeking completely new avenues of
expression that might enable it to survive.

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 46
Early to mid-Edo kanshi
judith n. rabinovitch
and timothy r. bradstock

In the Edo period kanshi continued to be an important cultural activity, as it

had been in previous eras. Continuities with the Gozan and even Heian
period traditions are evident throughout: while new topoi and themes
achieve prominence, kanshi on traditional topics continued to be written
well into the Meiji era and beyond. In terms of the history of kanshi
composition the Edo period is perhaps most appropriately divided into two
parts, with the first ending around 1780, when kanshi poets start to show a
significant level of concern with national affairs and with Japan’s growing
contacts with the outside world. At the same time, other relatively well-
established trends begin to intensify, most notably an interest in writing
about mundane matters and popular culture. Historically, the kanshi written
during the final century of the Edo period have garnered the most critical
attention, with proportionally less interest being directed toward verse from
the earlier period, which will be the focus of this chapter.
The majority of kanshi from the seventeenth century were composed by
Buddhist monks and Confucian scholar-officials, most of whom wrote verse as
an intellectual sideline rather than as professional full-time poets. (A rare excep-
tion was Ishikawa Jōzan [1583–1672], who devoted most of his life to kanshi.)
Some taught in private academies or in government schools and conducted
scholarly research in Confucian studies, literature, or other fields. Overall, kanshi
composition during this period was sharply limited by class and education, not
yet having extended far among townsmen. A general decline had occurred in
Kangaku (Chinese studies) during the civil strife of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries; moreover, relatively few people possessed the kind of advanced
literacy in Chinese that was obtained through education in the classics. This
impeded the progress of kanshi writing at the beginning of the Edo period.
Further, the shogunate at this time maintained a utilitarian view of literature,
regarding it not as an aesthetic outlet but as an instrument for the promotion of

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Confucian morality and social stability and to buttress the political order.
Beyond this, literature had little raison d’être: as Fujiwara Seika (1561–1619), the
earliest important Edo poet, stated, “There is no literature separate from the
Way, and no Way separate from literature.” Yet even Seika and his Neo-
Confucian contemporaries often composed verse that did not conform to this
didactic model, an example being “Recited in a Drunken State,” by the daimyō
Date Masamune (1567–1636), with its manifestly un-Confucian title and final line:
My youth has passed me by in a flash.
The world is at peace, but my hair has gone grey.
Heaven has granted me this old shell of a body:
Why go on living if I can’t enjoy myself?1

Despite the existence of many early Edo kanshi that are stylistically
sophisticated and forward-looking in their choice of topoi, many scholars
have given short shrift to poems from the seventeenth century except for the
works of a select few poets, notably Ishikawa Jōzan, Priest Gensei (1623–68),
and Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), which draw praise for their personalism, everyday
subject matter, and plain diction. Emura Hokkai (1713–88), in his history of
kanshi titled Nihon shishi (1771), singles out Jōzan and Gensei as the two
greatest kanshi poets of the late seventeenth century; kanshi master Kan
Chazan (also Sazan; 1748–1827), in his poem “Shisendō,” narrows the field
even further, opining that (in the seventeenth century) “there was only
Jōzan.” Jōzan’s “A Poem Written While Ill on a Summer Night” illustrates
the charming local color and realism of his style:
My body is frail and my days are nearly done.
My heart’s at ease, but tonight I cannot sleep.
The croaking of frogs and the songs of the cuckoo
Mingle with the rain, breaking my sickbed sleep.

But these qualities are by no means confined to the works of the three poets
noted above, even though verse of a more conventional nature was predo-
minant during this early part of the Edo age. Many worthy poets of this
period have largely been overlooked, including a number of prolific writers
belonging to the school established by Hayashi Razan (1583–1657). Razan’s
own oeuvre comprises close to 4,700 verses and was praised by the Chinese
1
This poem and most of the other translations in this chapter appear in Timothy
R. Bradstock and Judith N. Rabinovitch, trans. and annot., An Anthology of Kanshi
(Chinese Verse) by Japanese Poets of the Edo Period (1603–1868), Japanese Studies 3
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). Several others have been translated for this
chapter and have not been previously published.

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 Early to mid-Edo kanshi

philologist Yu Yue (1821–1907). A fourteen-line pailü (long regulated verse) by

Razan titled “Sunpu” (1643), which deals with a massive fire in Shizuoka in
1635, ignited by accumulated pigeon droppings, illustrates the appealing
domesticity present in many seventeenth-century kanshi. Razan’s son Gahō
(1618–80) is said to have been the most prolific kanshi poet of the Edo period,
having composed more than 7,700 poems; yet he remains understudied
considering the size and quality of his corpus. Surrounding the Hayashi
literati and other leading practitioners such as Tokugawa Mitsukuni
(1628–1700) were various informal poetic coteries, forerunners of the well-
known shisha (kanshi composition societies) that flourished in the second half
of the eighteenth century. In much of their verse one can detect an authentic,
down-to-earth flavor and native idiosyncracies in diction and syntax, which
were often disparagingly described by Japanese commentators as possessing
washū, i.e. a “Japanese taint.” Toriyama Shiken (1655–1715) was yet another of
the more imaginative early poets, finding inspiration in low-brow topics such
as servants, prostitutes, and the misery of illness. Even earlier, in the kanshi of
Priest Bunshi Genshō (1555–1620), we are reminded that the Gozan tradition,
with all its earthy vulgarity, had not completely vanished:
At the village assembly the men and women are wearing clothes
that are new.
Together they raise their cups of wine, drinking until sundown.
Their shoulders droop from their heavy loads: what could they
have brought?
They’re carrying home upon their backs the people who are drunk!

Among the first prominent scholars to break openly with the orthodox
shogunal stance on literature and champion versification for its own sake
were Ogyū Sorai (Ken’en, 1666–1728) and his numerous Kobunji-ha (Archaist)
followers in the Ken’en school. The legacy of Tang pastoral verse is clearly
evident in Sorai’s “Farmhouses on the River,” where the humble bucolic
imagery exudes an undeniable appeal, notwithstanding the debt owed to the
Chinese poets Wang Wei and Meng Haoran:
The lane follows the river’s twisting course.
Between the farmhouses fences are few.
By the low riverbank people wash their plowshares;
After the rain they dry their fishing clothes.
Calves bearing firewood drink from the river;
Farmers on skiffs return from harvesting wheat.
Children are playing upon the sand,
As sea gulls wheel about overhead.

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Sorai promoted the kakuchō (formalist) approach to poetry-writing, advocat-

ing the emulation of the Chinese masters, the High Tang poets in particular,
although only a limited selection among their numerous topoi were adopted.
Whether Sorai’s influence resulted in kanshi becoming markedly more
imitative of Tang styles than before is open to question.
In any event, during Sorai’s lifetime kanshi production increased steadily,
partly through his school’s efforts to promote and liberate the genre but also
because of social and demographic changes occurring in Japanese society.
Following population growth, the expansion of cities, and rising literacy
rates, the social basis of kanshi composition gradually broadened to include
people from landowning, mercantile, and professional backgrounds. Hattori
Nankaku (1683–1759) was the son of a merchant and Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), the
son of a lumber seller; the father of Naba Kassho (1595–1648) was a prosperous
farmer. Kanshi versification was becoming deeply embedded in the fabric of
public and private social life: throughout the Edo period and beyond, countless
tanzaku poems, recorded on attractive paper and other media, were composed
and exchanged among friends with a casualness rivaling the modern Western
use of the picture postcard. In short, far from remaining a peripheral literary
activity practiced by a narrow segment of the elite, kanshi writing filtered
down to all classes with access to education, particularly after 1700.
Edo kanshi poets composed shi 詩 almost exclusively, seldom employing
the other traditional Chinese poetic forms, such as the ci 詞 (lyric). The two
principal varieties of regulated Chinese verse, jueju (four lines, J. zekku) and
lüshi (eight lines, J. risshi), account for the vast majority of compositions.
These by and large observe the rules for regulated verse, which include the
use of verbal parallelism, the implementation of end rhyme in even-num-
bered lines, and alternating tonal sequences in fixed positions throughout the
verse for variation. Pailü (regulated verse longer than eight lines, J. hairitsu)
became more popular, especially from the late seventeenth century, two
examples being Naba Kassho’s “My Circumstances” (fifty lines) and Muro
Kyūsō’s (1658–1734) “Grapevine Song” (forty-eight lines). Some of the longer
poems are koshi (“old style” poems), so called because they do not fully
comply with the conventions of regulated verse. Five- and seven-character
line lengths were favored almost equally, although longer poems are most
often pentasyllabic; verse in irregular meter is relatively uncommon.
Private occasional poetry, typically composed in solitude, makes up a large
segment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kanshi, remaining a staple
well beyond the Edo period. Usually set in the countryside, this verse offers
broad-brushed sketches of scenes viewed during travel or at a remote retreat.

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 Early to mid-Edo kanshi

The surroundings are usually depicted as spartan, yet offering endless simple
pleasures. The spirit of Tao Yuanming (365–427) is often nearby, as illustrated
by the following poem by Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), compiler of the Teiunshū
(Cloud-Stopping Anthology, 1718):
Dawn breaks above the blue mountains.
Sparrows leave the forest, chirping as they fly.
Young bamboos rise out of the haze,
A solitary flower glistens with dew.
I brew some tea, steam clouds swirling around my bed.
I brush my snowy hair, which droops like the ties on a cap.
I find myself sitting with no duties to perform,
Waiting for sunrise by the eastern window.

Unlike Tao, however, few kanshi poets withdrew to the countryside out of a
desire to escape official life or make a political protest, nor were they
propelled by a need to preserve their personal safety. Instead, pure aestheti-
cism and the enjoyment of nature provided their main motivation. Many
scenic poems are set at dusk or dawn, or perhaps late at night when the poet
has been awakened by a shower of rain, a temple bell, or the sound of wind-
blown leaves. Autumn is by far the favorite season. The descriptive imagery,
typically utilizing the moon, mountains, wind, and rain, tends to be general-
ized and conventional, seldom displaying distinctive detail. One of Sorai’s
leading disciples was Hattori Nankaku, whose poem “Early Coolness” is
typical of the low-key and soothing nature-centered verse popular through-
out the Edo age:
After rain the setting sun shines faintly in the western hills.
Who’d imagine that the autumn chill would return so soon this night.
The white clouds never waited for the autumn winds to blow.
They’ve fled already, hither and yon, for the sake of this melancholy one!

Many of the quatrains display an even higher degree of lyrical restraint. Often
the focus is upon juxtaposing natural images to create an elegant, rarified
atmosphere, one rich in modal associations and, as likely as not, evoking the
quality of sabi, a withered, melancholy beauty central to Japanese aesthetics.
The tonal influence of vernacular waka upon such kanshi is often evident, as
is demonstrated by Miyake Kanran’s (1674–1718) vignette titled “A Small
Gathering at a House in the Pines,” which embodies the stasis and diminished
human presence commonly associated with Wang Wei:
Peach trees bloom in silence by the bamboo hedge.
Twilight crows gather west of the misty wall.

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Deep in the house, an unflickering silver candle; rain is falling outside.

Someone is reciting a tale from Heike to the strains of music from a lute.

Besides drawing poetic inspiration from the countryside and its landscapes,
Edo poets soon developed an interest in depicting city life and the chōnin
(townsmen) culture, in particular the “floating world” of courtesans and
pleasure-seekers. Chikushi (bamboo branch) verse, as some of this is
known, is mainly associated with the late eighteenth century and beyond,
yet examples from the seventeenth century also exist, including the following
quatrain by Toriyama Shiken, which could doubtless pass for a poem written
around the 1820s:

A heavy drinker who calls herself “The Female Blue Willow”

Day after day keeps company with young gentlemen at their parties.
When drunk in spring sometimes she finds she cannot help herself:
Falling asleep among the flowers, with her pipa as a pillow.

In the late eighteenth century, the style of seirei (Ch. xingling 性霊,
spiritualist or native sensibility) experienced a popular resurgence, having
been sidelined (at least according to some accounts) by kakuchō verse in the
late seventeenth century. Seirei was associated mainly with Yuan Hongdao
(1568–1610) and later Yuan Mei (1716–98), but had roots in the mid-Tang.
Writers of such verse strove to avoid imitation of earlier masters, instead
describing everyday personal experiences in plain, non-dramatic language
and using few textual allusions. Ishikawa Jōzan and Priest Gensei are the
earliest well-known seirei poets of the Edo age. Although they are often
characterized as anomalies, some of their contemporaries, including
Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82), also wrote such verse, as the following Ansai
poem illustrates:

From time to time I think about the wondrous principles of life.

All things produced by Heaven deserve our appreciation.
In summer, mosquitoes approach my ears, rousing me from sleep,
And making my body become acquainted with itchiness and pain.

Another relatively early seirei verse is Gion Nankai’s (1677–1751) elegy on the
death of his cat. This was perhaps inspired by an earlier verse on a similar
topic by the eleventh-century poet Mei Yaochen, an exponent of the so-called
pingdan (low-key and bland) style, an antecedent of the seirei style. A further
example of this style, a poem titled “Written Extemporaneously While Ill,”
by Itō Tan’an (1623–1708), is unapologetically direct, even sharp, in its tone,

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manifesting an eccentric personalism commonly seen in seirei verse. It begins

with these lines:
With time on my hands I’ve not stopped writing verse.
In this weakened state, medicine can do me no good.
It’s quite enough if my heart and body feel comfortable.
Why let myself be oppressed by etiquette and social niceties?
The humor glimpsed in Ansai’s mosquito poem becomes increasingly pre-
valent in kanshi by mid-Edo, one example being the following quatrain by
Murase Kōtei (1746–1818):
I can’t make out these fly-speck characters, reading by the lamp.
Glasses perch on the bridge of my nose to help me see more clearly.
I lunge to wipe my gummy eyes but cannot get at them.
My little grandson claps his hands and laughs at my careless haste.
The early seirei versifiers seem to prefer shorter forms; it would be a
challenge to find any composition from before the nineteenth century that
resembles the rambling and intimate soliloquies of Han Yu, such as his poem
on losing his teeth. Rai San’yō (1780–1832), particularly in his longer poems
about traveling with his mother, seems to be the poet who mastered this
discursive seirei style, with its abundance of vivid personal detail.
Overall, however, the mainstream in Edo kanshi down to the late eight-
eenth century is verse on traditional topoi: for every lyrical or eccentric poem
there are perhaps seven that do little more than flatly describe a serene
landscape. Unhappy sentiments are largely confined to bereavement verse,
Gion Nankai’s “Lament for My Younger Brother Shigetomo” being one
example. The frustration caused by career failure, a common theme among
Heian versifiers, is seldom present; similarly, declarations of personal med-
iocrity (and laments about failure to advance in the civil service) are also all
but gone by this time. Living in relatively untroubled times, the early to mid-
Edo poets seem generally content and self-sufficient, leaving the impression
that their own company – and their natural surroundings – were enough to
sustain them.
Although Edo kanshi poets employ Chinese historical and literary allusions
in their verse, these are generally infrequent, inserted sometimes just as a nod
to convention or as a convenient way of providing closure. Most allusions are
fairly familiar ones; but even these become less common as seirei verse
evolves. Textual allusions never entirely disappear, however; during the
nineteenth century kanshi poets mined the historical and literary heritages
of both China and Japan, seeking to draw parallels and contrasts. The rise in

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consciousness of contemporary national issues after around 1800 led to the

co-optation of kanshi as a medium for political discourse; prior to this time
criticism of the shogunate and their handling of political affairs had been
relatively rare. While it is hard to imagine that the early to mid-Edo poets saw
nothing to criticize in their society, the burning intensity of the later shishi
(men of high purpose) poets, with their strident patriotism and rage against
both the shogunate and foreign nations, is largely a nineteenth-century
phenomenon. Paradoxically, the principle of harnessing kanshi for political
ends, espoused by the Tokugawa regime in the early seventeenth century but
eventually eclipsed, had returned – this time in an irrevocably changing Japan
bestrode by a new cast of actors intent on using kanshi to further an entirely
different set of goals, ones that were unimaginable a generation before.

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 47
Kanshibun in the late Edo period
matthew fraleigh

The nineteenth century witnessed the peak, certainly in quantity and argu-
ably in quality, of kanshi (Sinitic poetry) and kanbun (Sinitic prose) production
in Japan. While these two terms, along with the collective kanshibun, are now
ubiquitous, it is worth bearing in mind a slight distinction between
Anglophone and Japanese usage. When Anglophone scholars write of kanshi
or kanbun, they often mean works by Japanese composers specifically, but in
Japanese usage these terms in fact refer to Literary Sinitic poetry or prose as a
whole, regardless of authorial nationality. Moreover, these kan-prefixed terms
only became common in the mid-Meiji period, before which Japanese produ-
cers of Sinitic poetry and prose tended to call the works they wrote simply shi
or bun; for these contemporaneous terms as well, the designated works were
not limited to those produced in Japan but encompassed all poetry or prose in
Literary Sinitic. There are various ways to narrate the development of Sinitic
verse in the Edo period, but scholars often emphasize two key developments in
the early and late eighteenth century that produce a roughly three-part period-
ization: the formative seventeenth century, when kanshi composition was
largely the preserve of Confucian scholars; the first half of the eighteenth
century, associated with the rise of Ogyū Sorai’s kobunjiha (Ancient
Phraseology school), when close imitation of High Tang models such as
those gathered in the Tōshisen anthology was dominant (practiced even by
those who disagreed with Sorai on Confucian doctrinal issues); and the final
stage when new theories of personal expression focused on the individual
poet’s immediate experience helped not only to further popularize kanshi
composition but also to localize the form.
Inasmuch as the emergence of this final stage was marked by a pointed
rejection of the mid-Edo narrow valorization of High Tang aesthetics, the
shift is clear in the work of those active during the transition. The change first
became apparent in the Kamigata region: forerunners active there such as the
Kyoto-based Abbot Rikunyo (1734–1801) and the Hiroshima-based scholar

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Kan Chazan (or Kan Sazan, 1748–1827) both composed exclusively in the
imitative Ancient Phraseology style in their youth, but consciously aban-
doned this approach as their attention turned toward poems from the Song
dynasty and other periods. A representative poem from Kan Chazan’s later
work is the following, composed in 1811:
Reading Books on a Winter Night
Snow surrounds my mountain studio, the trees dark and deep;
Nothing bestirs the bell on my eaves as night grows still.
Calmly putting away scattered volumes, I consider their elusive meanings;
In the kernel of the lamp’s pale flame, the minds of the ancients.

A cognizance of the change is evident in the recollections of the scholar

Hirose Tansō (1782–1856), whose Kangien academy in Kyushu trained thou-
sands of disciples. He later recalled that the absolute supremacy of High Tang
poets had been so thoroughly instilled in him from childhood that he was
shocked at the age of eighteen to see a recently imported Qing edition
entitled Tang Song shi chun (The Essence of Tang and Song Poetry, 1750) –
for surely no one could seriously mention the poetry of the two dynasties in
the same breath.
As these examples indicate, one shorthand way of describing the late eight-
eenth-century transformation of Japanese kanshi is to say that it amounted to a
shift in models from Tang to Song. To some degree, Tansō’s recollections bear
this out, for having overcome his conviction that no poetry after the heights of
the Tang poets Li Bo and Du Fu was worthy of consideration, he was delighted
to explore the work of such Song giants as Lu You and Su Dongpo. Yet while
this formulation of a late Edo Tang–Song shift has a certain explanatory power,
it can also be misleading, since Song texts were not the sole source of late Edo
poets’ inspiration, not to mention confusing, since the mid-Edo rise of Sorai’s
Ancient Phraseology school several decades earlier is sometimes described
conversely as a shift from Song to Tang models. In other words, it is important
to recognize that the late Edo shift derived principally not from the discovery of
hitherto unknown texts, but from new ways of approaching them and from an
altered understanding of the larger enterprise of poetic expression. As Hino
Tatsuo has argued, the Sorai school played a key role in temporarily liberating
Sinitic poetic expression in Japan from its previous association with the austere
restraint and rigorous moralism of Song Confucianism, enabling a more
tolerant view of human affective experience. The romantic themes and exag-
gerated expressions common to High Tang poems, Sorai thought, were
especially suited to these aims. Moreover, Sorai helped to affirm literary

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composition as an enterprise with intrinsic worth, and by the mid eighteenth

century professional poets, those who made their living writing and teaching
Sinitic poetry rather than pursuing it as a supplementary accomplishment,
began to appear.
It was in these transformed circumstances that late Edo poets made their
departure from the High Tang models revered by Sorai and his disciples. The
emergence of distinctly late Edo kanshi was driven in part by the expansion of
permissible textual models beyond the tightly circumscribed High Tang
canon, but it was given additional grounding by the dissemination of late
Ming theories that placed value not so much on high tone, but on the poet’s
expression of xingling (J. seirei 性霊) or “innate sensibility.” Rather than
focusing on scrupulous faithfulness to the formal features of Tang models
as earlier Ming classicists had, Chinese figures such as Yuan Hongdao
(1568–1610) argued for expression true to the poet’s distinct experience and
unique individuality. Yamamoto Hokuzan (1752–1812) was one early Japanese
proponent of the xingling theory, and his manifesto Sakushi shikō (The Aim of
Poetic Composition, 1783) resoundingly rebuked the techniques of imitation
advocated by Sorai and his disciples, forcefully declaring that genuine poetry
originated only from the sensitive self.
The xingling theory’s emphasis on individualistic expression meant that its
exponents often turned their attention to their own everyday experiences
rather than trying to project themselves into the poetic realms of their Tang
predecessors. This development had particular significance for late Edo
Japanese kanshi practitioners, for whom High Tang style poems about, for
example, defending the frontier from northern barbarians, had little counter-
part in their daily lives. Yet, more importantly, it enlarged the scope of their
expressivity, spurring them to take up distinctly domestic subjects that had
heretofore been dismissed as vulgar or local and thus incompatible with the
refined realms that poets endeavored to create.
The transformative effect of the xingling theory is particularly evident in
the career of Ichikawa Kansai (1749–1820), a scholar employed at the
Shōheizaka Gakumonjo: a Confucian academy in Edo that enjoyed official
sponsorship. Trained in the Ancient Phraseology school, Kansai had pro-
duced several important works of scholarship on Tang poetry while still a
young man, but in 1786 he published Hokurika (Songs of the Northern Ward),
a sequence of thirty kanshi composed about Edo’s Yoshiwara licensed dis-
trict, treating topics that would have been unthinkably local and inappropri-
ately crass according to earlier standards. One poem from the series depicts a
courtesan in late morning dishabille:

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The sun is already high as the jade curtains rise;

Last night’s makeup and left-over powder, but still she is graceful.
Her charming chignon has yet to acquire the look of morning clouds
When a bell rings out to announce the noon hour.

That Kansai chose to publish Hokurika pseudonymously indicates his wariness

of the disdain that such an effort might well meet, but the text was soon
heralded as an emblem of the new approach’s ascendance. Kansai’s disciple
Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767–1837) remarked a few years later that it “demonstrated
that there was nothing that was beyond the expressive limits of xingling poems.”
Kansai resigned his post at the central academy shortly after publishing
Hokurika, turning his attention to overseeing the Kōkosha, an Edo poetry
group that produced several major kanshi poets of the late Edo period,
including Kashiwagi Jotei (1763–1819) and Kikuchi Gozan (1769–1849), in
addition to Shibutsu. The Kōkosha name itself was significant, for it explicitly
situated the poetry group within “society at large,” rather than in the halls of
officialdom, giving poetic expression a clear independence from the states-
man’s articulation of political aspiration.
Kansai’s Kōkosha disciples enthusiastically took up domestic themes in
their kanshi, turning their attention to the distinctive features of Japan’s
natural environment and urban culture. To take one illustrative example,
as Niina Noriko has observed, the Kōkosha poets actively composed poems
on cherry blossoms, a celebrated subject of vernacular Japanese poetry that
nevertheless had little place in the compositions of mid-Edo kanshi poets, for
the tree itself was not native to China and thus not part of its traditional verse.
Because the Chinese graph used in Japan for the cherry tree referred in China
to a different species, some mid-Edo kanshi poets argued that using it to
indicate the Japanese cherry tree was washū, an awkward and tainted
Japanese practice that should be avoided. While the Kōkosha poets remained
firmly committed to upholding the prosodic rules and basic conventions of
Sinitic poetry, their greater tolerance for such local variations helped to
further naturalize kanshi composition in late Edo Japan. In a poem titled
“Early Summer,” for example, the cuckoo’s arrival signals the time of year,
but so too does Jotei’s depiction of the lengths to which Edo residents might
go to partake of the first katsuo (skipjack tuna) catch of the season:

My money all spent on spring pleasures, the first cuckoo sings;

The green of the trees grows deeper now, after a passing rain.
I remove my new robe to pawn for a fresh taste;
Outside my sunlit window, someone sells skipjack tuna.

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During his extensive domestic travels, Jotei in this manner composed fre-
quently on his connoisseurship of regional culinary delights and his apprecia-
tion of unique local cultural practices.
Like Jotei, other prominent Kōkosha poets such as Shibutsu and Gozan also
traveled widely, interacting with local literati in regions outside of the major
population centers, thereby facilitating the spread of kanshi composition to a
wider array of geographical areas and social classes while also disseminating new
approaches. Alongside such outreach, both Shibutsu and Gozan also played an
important role in publishing influential shiwa or “talks on poetry,” texts that
combined features of the poetic anthology, the technical manual, and the
compositional treatise. While there were earlier isolated examples of Japanese
shiwa as far back as the medieval period, it was in late Edo that the genre truly
flourished. Highly developed commercial publishing, advanced networks brid-
ging rural and urban areas, and the rise of kanshibun literacy had dramatically
enlarged the audience for such texts, which bound their readers (many of whom
were also contributors) together in new forms of collectivity. Ibi Takashi argues
that Gozan’s Gozandō shiwa (Gozandō’s Talks on Poetry, 1807–32) marked the
founding of journalistic criticism in Japan, for it targeted a non-specific plurality
of readers, was published periodically, contained contemporaneous information
and criticism, and provided its editor with his main source of livelihood.
In addition to these developments driven predominantly by poets in the
private sector, official policies introduced by the Tokugawa shogunate helped
to further expand and consolidate kanshibun literacy in late Edo. The Kansei
Reforms of 1790 gave Zhu Xi Confucianism the stamp of orthodoxy while
prohibiting other schools of thought from being taught at the Shōheizaka
academy. Many domains followed this central policy change by giving official
sanction to existing local academies or establishing new ones that modeled their
curriculum on the central academy. Codification of the Confucian canon, the
implementation of examinations and regularized curricula, and heightened
coordination between peripheral and central educational sites made proficiency
in Literary Sinitic an important attainment for a much broader range of indivi-
duals. Familiarity with Literary Sinitic discourse became in this way increasingly
attainable to ever broader swaths of the populace as the end of the Edo period
approached. Private academies offering instruction in reading Literary Sinitic
appeared in both urban and peripheral areas, and by the first decades of the
nineteenth century a variety of inexpensive annotated editions of primary texts
made self-study of the Chinese classics accessible even to rural commoners.
One late Edo figure whose kanshi and kanbun alike enjoyed immense
popularity among both samurai and commoner readers was poet and

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historian Rai San’yō (1780–1832). Boldly treating Japanese historical topics and
themes, his poems were memorized and recited by Meiji students, and even
today remain among the best-known kanshi. Likewise, his Nihon gaishi (An
Unofficial History of Japan, 1827), a multivolume survey of Japanese history
from late Heian through mid-Edo, became a celebrated bestseller that capti-
vated readers with its dramatic retellings of historical events and its stirring
prose style. Organized around the rise and fall of successive military clans, the
text was widely used as a textbook in educational institutions from late Edo
into Meiji and was even reprinted in China.
San’yō’s poetry also contains several works in which he directs his gaze to
emerging concerns that would have increasing relevance to Japanese in the
nineteenth century. An 1817 visit to Nagasaki led him to compose a substan-
tial ballad on a Dutch ship he observed there, and during the same trip a
conversation with a Dutch physician about the Napoleonic wars led San’yō
to compose a lengthy and detailed poem on “The French King.” San’yō’s
poem is one of the earliest kanshi on Napoleon, and many other late Edo
kanshi poets, including Ōtsuki Bankei (1801–78), eagerly followed in his foot-
steps. The following poem is one of a series of “Twelve Songs on the French
King” that Bankei composed in 1841, just two decades after Napoleon’s death:
For half a lifetime, his military might spread across the West;
The annals of history shall long record his brilliant glory.
Ever since in deed and name he became the Great Emperor,
None speaks in envious admiration of Alexander the Great.
If one central element of Japanese literary modernity consists of creative
engagement with the culture and texts of the Western world, Sugishita
Motoaki has argued, then it is in such late Edo kanshi that the borderline
between early modern and modern sensibilities can first be discerned.
In addition to the orthodox modes of kanshi and kanbun composition that
flourished in late Edo, the era also saw the emergence of humorous genres
that amused by willfully deviating from convention. Kyōshi, or “crazy
poems,” such as those by Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823), brazenly incorporated
Japanese vernacular vocabulary into Literary Sinitic verse and became espe-
cially popular during the last century of the Edo period. Alongside prose
analogues such as Terakado Seiken’s Edo hanjōki (A Record of Flourishing
Edo, 1832–6), these hybrid texts offered humorous depictions of contempor-
ary manners and mores while also serving as vehicles of politically charged
satire.

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Waka practice and poetics in the Edo
period
roger thomas

Although conventional wisdom tends not to regard waka (classical Japanese

poetry) as a genre representative of the Edo period, in terms of sheer volume
the age produced far more of that type of verse than any preceding era. The
growth of its popularity was due in no small measure to the expansion of
literacy, but a persistent yearning among the newly literate for refinement
and for the belletristic glories of Japan’s classical past was also an important
factor. Waka practice of the period is sometimes dismissed as merely imita-
tive – either of the canonical Heian style or of the eighth-century anthology
Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves) – but in the hands of many early
modern poets it proved to be a worthy medium for artistic vigor and
creativity. Furthermore, the waka poetics of the age is widely considered
among the crowning intellectual achievements of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, one that is in every respect representative of the period.
In spite of the fact that the political hegemony of the samurai class had
been vehemently reasserted early in the seventeenth century by the establish-
ment of the Tokugawa shogunate, certain cultural institutions, including the
teaching of waka composition, were more closely monopolized by the
aristocracy than before. The relative social power of the warrior class and
the courtiers is reflected in a set of laws promulgated by the new shogunate,
Kinchū narabi ni kuge shohatto (Laws Pertaining to the Imperial Household and
the Aristocracy, 1613); the first of these accords to the courtiers a special role
as custodians of the traditional arts, including waka. The nobility shored up
its monopoly on the teaching of poetry through jealous guardianship of
various secret transmissions (hiden). What had been known generally as the
Kokin denju (Secret Transmissions on the Kokinshū) came in the early seven-
teenth century to be divided into the Gosho denju (Palace Transmission) and
various jige denju (commoner transmissions), the former restricted to cour-
tiers while poets from the samurai and merchant classes received – some-
times purchased – the latter from their aristocratic teachers. Even the request

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of the third Tokugawa shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–51) to be instructed

in the Gosho denju was rebuffed. The poetry of Kinoshita Chōshōshi
(1569–1649), the first commoner publicly to disregard and even criticize the
monopoly of the nobles, met with scorn and brutal criticism.
The final two decades of the seventeenth century saw in the intellectual
life of Japan two developments that would prove to have a decisive influence
on waka poetry, first on its poetics but later also on its practice. These were
Kokugaku (nativist study) and Kogaku (Confucian ancient learning). Though
the former often professed hostility toward the latter, in reality much
Kokugaku discourse was indebted to the methods of inquiry promoted by
contemporaneous trends in Confucian scholarship that likewise sought to
reestablish the primacy of ancient texts. In 1690, the Shingon monk Keichū
(1640–1701) completed his magnum opus modestly titled Man’yōdaishōki (An
Apprentice’s Records on the Man’yōshū), the first comprehensive and heavily
documented study of that ancient volume. Keichū’s work set lofty metho-
dological standards for later scholars, but also opened up a world of high
literary culture over which the courtiers exercised no authority. While the
seventeenth century began with aristocratic domination of the art, it ended
with decided numerical supremacy of commoners, among whom was man-
ifest a growing disregard of court prerogative.
It was not until the eighteenth century that Kokugaku came to be recog-
nized as a formidable intellectual movement. In 1728, the hereditary priest at
the Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), submitted to the
shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751) a document titled Sōgakkōkei
(Petition for the Establishment of a School) questioning exclusive govern-
ment patronage of Neo-Confucianism and challenging the shogunate to
support study of the national classics. Perhaps because of its adversarial
rhetoric, Azumamaro’s petition was not granted; it did, however, mark the
emergence of Kokugaku as a self-conscious faction. It also linked Kokugaku
with an emerging spirit of nationalism that would grow more pronounced
over time and that would increasingly enlist waka as a means to its ends.
As Kokugaku developed a discrete intellectual identity, it not only assumed
a more competitive stance toward the prestige Sinology had enjoyed among
the samurai caste, but also came to bear unconcealed hostility toward
continental culture in general, idealizing instead a pristine native society
that allegedly prevailed prior to contact with China. Waka had traditionally
eschewed all diction of foreign derivation, and its poetics came to occupy
pride of place in Kokugaku writing. Both Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) and
his nominal disciple Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) were poets of some repute,

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but today they are remembered chiefly for their theories. Initially Mabuchi’s
ideal appears to have been situated in the early anonymous verse in the
Kokinshū (Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, c. 905–14), but shifted
over the course of his career first to the Man’yōshū, and finally to the earliest
songs appearing in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712) and the Nihon
shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720). He insisted on the importance of reclaiming
the ancient mind and argued that this could best be accomplished through
language and poetry, maintaining in his treatise Niimanabi (New Learning,
1765) that although “there are many phenomena in the world, there exists
nothing outside of mind and words,” and that “only after knowing these two
well can one also understand the ancients.” In the same work he also
advanced the idea that “in ancient poems, rhythm (shirabe) was the main
concern, because they were sung,” marking a shift in early modern poetics
toward phonocentrism, a development that would become more pro-
nounced in the following generation of theoreticians. Some of Mabuchi’s
most memorable verses are found in his sequences, an ancient practice that
he revived to good effect. A couple of stanzas from a sequence on the ninth
lunar month include:

The plain of heaven is clear and serene on this autumn night –

wild geese cross the sky, crying, in the shining moonlight.
Aki no yo no hogarahogara to ama no hara teru tsukikage ni kari nakiwataru

This Long-Night Month for which the crickets have waited with eager
delight –
an evening with the purest moon, may it not wear on in vain!
Kōrogi no machiyorokoberu nagatsuki no kiyoki tsukiyo wa fukezu mo aranan

As it turned out, Mabuchi’s legacy was diverse; there were disciples who
adhered to the “orthodox” Man’yōshū-centered stylistic and critical ideal,
while another nominal follower, Norinaga, paid scant attention to that
volume as a model. Another faction claiming to represent Mabuchi’s teach-
ings, the so-called Edo school, is noted for its emphasis on genteel refinement
of style and for its positive assessment of Chinese literary culture – both
stances that would appear to be at odds with the teachings of their mentor’s
later years. This school, centered in Edo and reflecting the increasingly urban
and urbane tastes that prevailed there, is represented most notably by Katō
Chikage (1735–1808) and Murata Harumi (1746–1811). An example of Harumi’s
polished alliterative diction is this verse on the Chinese painting topic (gadai)
“New-Fallen Snow on the Waterway”:

473
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No more sound of dripping from the thatched roof of the moored boat –
the midnight drizzle changes to snow.
Tomaribune toma no shizuku no oto taete yowa no shigure zo yuki ni nariyuku

Though Norinaga’s prodigious corpus of poetry draws scant attention now,

his waka poetics proved to be a watershed for much succeeding theory, his
disciples forming what came to be known as the Suzunoya School. In his
Ashiwake obune (Small Boat Parting the Reeds, c. 1759) and Isonokami sasame-
goto (Whisperings from Isonokami, published posthumously, 1816) he departs
from his Kokugaku predecessors in rejecting a political role for waka, in
viewing the purpose of native verse as sincere expression rather than as
cultivation of the self, and in idealizing the style of the Shinkokin wakashū
(New Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, 1205). The term mono no
aware (pathos of things) with which Norinaga’s name is practically synon-
ymous and which is generally associated with his criticism of Genji monogatari
(The Tale of Genji) actually had its genesis in his waka poetics. In Isonokamai
sasamegoto, a disciple asks how one is to know this quality. Norinaga begins
his response by citing the preface to the Kokinshū, maintaining that “When
anything moves the heart to deep feelings, whether of joy or sorrow . . . this is
knowing mono no aware.” Norinaga’s poetics and analysis of Genji monogatari
share this concept; in his Shibun yōryō (Essentials of Murasaki’s Writings, 1763)
he claims that “apart from this Tale, there is no Way of waka, and apart from
the Way of waka, this Tale does not exist.”
Waka poetry was also practiced by many bunjin (literati), polymaths often
accomplished in several arts who tended to look askance at popular culture
and who often remained aloof from coteries and schools. In many cases their
compositions do not rise above dilettantism, but a few bunjin became
noteworthy poets in their own right. One of these was Ueda Akinari
(1734–1809), best known for his fiction, including Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of
Moonlight and Rain, 1776). At first, Akinari wrote haikai (popular linked
verse), but he later turned to waka. Though not formally aligned with any
school, he had little patience with the proscriptions and rules of the classical
style, and showed evidence of influence from Kokugaku. His verses often
employ imagery that is both vivid and folksy, as in:
Oblivious to the pattering of rain, rice threshers’ voices
enliven the night in the wintry mountain village.
Oto tatsuru shigure mo shirade inakoki no yogoe nigiwau fuyu no yamazato

Norinaga’s and Akinari’s generation of poets also witnessed the growth of a

new movement allied neither to the court tradition nor to Kokugaku. This

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new current of thought – which focused chiefly on the Kokinshū but which
claimed to discover in that volume poetic values very different from those of
the court masters – appears to have had its impetus in the writings of Ozawa
Roan (1723–1801), a low-ranking samurai who in fact began his study under
the tutelage of courtiers. Although he came to reject his masters’ claims to
authority, he continued to share their high estimation of the Kokinshū,
though radically reinterpreted. He held that one could attain the spirit of
that anthology only by being true to one’s own poetic vision, that a good
verse should contain both dōjō (shared sentiment) and shinjō (new sentiment),
the former apparently referring to the fund of affect that binds people
together across time, the latter based on the poet’s personal and discrete
experience. Among his well-known verses is:

Awesome, the sound of the wind as it comes howling

through Uzumasa’s dense woods – an evening in autumn.
Uzumasa no fukaki hayashi o hibikikuru kaze no to sugoki aki no yūgure

Here Uzumasa, a place rich in historical and poetic associations (dōjō),

forms the backdrop for the poet’s unmediated experience of the present
(shinjō).
Although never formally Roan’s disciple, Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843) was
certainly the most worthy inheritor of his ideals. Likewise hailing from a low-
ranking samurai family and initially receiving instruction in the court style, in
his mid-thirties Kageki underwent a radical shift in style. That, combined
with his public lectures on the Kokinshū – an activity his court instructors
insisted was inappropriate for a commoner – resulted in formal severance of
ties with his aristocratic mentors. He went on to become one of the best-
known poets of the nineteenth century, his influence extending well into the
Meiji period. Kageki attempted to take Mabuchi’s nascent phonocentrism in a
decidedly new direction, elevating the idea of “rhythm” (shirabe) to the level
of a universal constant. Advancing an argument recorded in his disciple’s
Kagaku teiyō (A Summary of Waka Poetics, 1843), he contended that “a poem
is not reasoned, it is given rhythm.” This concept of rhythm is ubiquitous
throughout his various theoretical treatises, in some cases with auditory
implications and in others suggesting an almost extrasensory ideal. Though
the term is not always applied with consistency or precision, significantly the
Kokinshū is presented as its finest expression. His elusive ideal is perhaps
reflected in one of his most often cited verses, one that juxtaposes static and
transitory images:

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Its image mirrored in the ceaseless flow of the Ōi River –

this year, too, it has blossomed: the same wild cherry tree.
Ōigawa kaeranu mizu ni kage miete kotoshi mo sakeru yamazakura kana

His collection also includes numerous haikaika, or “comic” waka:

Time, it seems, for the lowly mountaineer to indulge in a sound nap –
with no one to shoo them off, crows peck at the melons.
Yamagatsu mo umaki hirune no toki narashi uri hamu karasu ou hito mo nashi

Not all poets of the Edo period fit neatly into schools or movements. One
who – in spite of some evident influence from Kokugaku – was a maverick in
both practice and theory was the Zen poet-monk Ryōkan (1758–1831), the son
of a hereditary village headman in what is now Niigata prefecture. He came
under the tutelage of the abbot of a distant temple in present-day Okayama
prefecture, where he showed sufficient promise to be designated as successor
to the abbacy. Following his master’s death, however, he embarked on a five-
year period of mendicant wandering, eventually returning to his hometown
where he established a hermitage, sold calligraphy and begged for his living,
played with the village children, and wrote poetry. Although his composi-
tions in Japanese are generally not esteemed as highly as his Chinese verses,
of all waka poets of the Edo period he maintains the greatest name-recogni-
tion in modern Japan and thus deserves mention. Ryōkan’s poetry never
treats conventional “topics” (daiei) but is always closely tied to his immediate
experiences, as in the verse from his itinerant years:
Winds from the mountains, spare your fury! This night when
the traveler’s lonely bed is a single white robe.
Yamaoroshi yo itaku na fuki so shirotae no koromo katashiki tabine seshi yo wa

The final generation of Edo period waka poets may be represented by two
whose works are still often cited and admired: Ōkuma Kotomichi (1798–1868)
and Tachibana Akemi (1812–68), both of whose merchant-class origins
bespeak the extent of liberation of the art from its aristocratic monopoly
two centuries earlier.
In many respects, Kotomichi could be seen as an heir of the Kokinshū
revival movement. Though he neither met nor corresponded with Kageki, he
was familiar with the latter’s works, making numerous guardedly positive
references to him. Kotomichi shared with his spiritual predecessor a high
estimation of the Kokinshū, ascribing to that volume an unrivaled position as
an example of waka ideals. But where Kageki had advocated a well-regulated
rhythm as a universal constant, Kotomichi’s two treatises on poetics, Kozo no

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chiri (Dust of Yesteryear, c. 1839) and Hitorigochi (Monologue, c. 1844),

advance a more individualized ideal: kokoro (heart, mind). Many of his
poems betray stylistic similarities to contemporaneous haikai, often focusing
on children or minutiae. In his later years he traveled to the Kyoto-Osaka
region in an unsuccessful attempt to spread his teachings and style beyond his
native Kyushu. One of his best-known verses creates a touching vignette that
is representative of his perennial fondness for the young:
A child fast asleep on the young mother’s back –
in its hand, grasped unconsciously, a pinwheel is spinning.
Imo ga se ni neburu warawa no utsutsu naki te ni sae meguru kazaguruma kana
Likewise a product of the countryside, Tachibana Akemi hailed from Fukui.
By both training and temperament he was squarely in the Kokugaku camp,
though his idealization of a life of honest poverty (seihin) – a frequent theme
in his verse – was unusual for a nativist poet. The arrangement of his major
collection, Shinobunoya kashū (Collection from the House of Fond
Recollection, published posthumously, 1878), completely rejects traditional
structure, ordering the verses chronologically rather than by category,
employing headnotes of prodigious length, and including numerous
sequences. Shinto thought is ubiquitous in his poetry, as well as strong
xenophobic sentiment. His most famous sequence, Dokurakugin (Verses on
Solitary Pleasures), runs to fifty-one stanzas, all beginning with tanoshimi
wa . . . toki (It is a pleasure when . . .). An example from that sequence is:
It is a pleasure when, arising in the morning and going out,
I see a flower in bloom that wasn’t there yesterday.
Tanoshimi wa asa okiidete kinō made nakarishi hana no sakeru miru toki
Reflecting a growing regard for how verses sound, unusual auditory effects
are also often encountered in Akemi’s poetry:
Flitting to and fro the locusts hop annoyingly, reveling
in this Indian summer day, peasants thresh beans.
Inagomaro urusaku idete tobu aki no hiyori yorokobi hito mame o utsu
Here the alternating “i” and “o” of hiyori yorokobi is an apt accompaniment to
the image of the hopping insects.
As is evident in the fact that the period was dominated not only by revival
movements – whether of the Kokinshū or of the Man’yōshū – but also by
numerous celebrated debates drawing on ancient notions about the role of
waka in the health of the national polity, the accusation that waka of the Edo
period was backward-looking might appear justified. It is important to

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remember, however, that such cultural “nostalgia” came to be balanced by

an equal measure of innovation. In many respects, waka poetry and poetics of
the Edo period paved the way for the Meiji period modernization of tradi-
tional verse forms undertaken by such figures as Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903)
and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), both of whom often cited early modern
precedent.

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Literary thought in Confucian ancient
learning and Kokugaku
peter flueckiger

In the Tokugawa period, poetry played an important role in the ethical and
political philosophies of many Confucians in the Ancient Learning (Kogaku)
movement, such as Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who
sought to recover the original meaning of Confucian texts, which they believed
had been distorted by later commentaries. Poetry played a similar role for
many scholars of Kokugaku (national learning, or nativism), such as Kamo no
Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who advocated a
purely native Japanese culture freed from Confucianism and other foreign
influences. These figures were avid practitioners of traditional poetic forms in
either Chinese or Japanese, but their interest in such forms extended beyond
poetic composition to include theories about the contribution of poetry to a
properly ordered society. They saw Tokugawa society as plagued by a frag-
mentation of community, and looked to poetry as one means for restoring
wholeness and harmony to their world. They defined the essential core of
human nature as emotional, but found emotional bonds lacking in their
contemporary world; poetry, they believed, offered a solution through its
ability to communicate emotions and inspire empathy. At the same time,
they argued that cultural norms were necessary for giving structure and
order to society, and located these norms in idealized societies of ancient
China or Japan, which they sought to uncover through the philological analysis
of ancient texts. Here, too, poetry played a role, as they saw it as having a
unique capacity to transmit the language and values of ancient cultures.
Scholars of Ancient Learning and Kokugaku criticized the moral univers-
alism of the Song dynasty Confucian Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who had found
many adherents in Tokugawa Japan. Zhu Xi equated the Confucian Way
with a universal “principle” (li 理, J. ri) that inheres in all things in the cosmos,
uniting them in a single moral order. Principle itself is purely abstract, but is
always accompanied by “material force” (qi 気, J. ki), which allows things to

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exist as physical realities. While principle is entirely virtuous, material force

can be morally either good or bad, depending on whether it facilitates or
obstructs the manifestation of principle. In the case of humans, principle is
represented by a purely good “original nature” (benran zhi xing 本然之性,
J. honzen no sei), while material force, or the “material nature” (qizhi zhi xing
気質之性, J. kishitsu no sei), is represented by the emotions (qing 情, J. jō).
The cultivation of humans as moral and social beings then involves correct-
ing the emotions so as to recover the original nature that all people innately
possess, but that can become obscured by immoral emotions. For Zhu Xi’s
Tokugawa critics, though, this subordination of emotions to moral values
amounted to a denial of the reality of human nature. Moreover, they saw his
belief in each individual’s innate possession of the Way as leading to a
dangerous subjectivism and solipsism, which they countered by turning to
cultural norms that transcend the individual.
Zhu Xi’s philosophy allows for a variety of perspectives on literature, three
of which have been described by Nakamura Yukihiko in a discussion of Zhu
Xi’s impact on early Tokugawa literary thought.1 The first is that literature
“transmits the Way” (saidō) when principle is expressed in moral emotions;
one figure who presented this view was Hayashi Razan (1583–1657). The
second, the view that immoral emotions expressed in literature represent
“toying with things and losing the will” (ganbutsu sōshi), is exemplified by
Yamazaki Ansai’s (1618–82) condemnation of the corrupting force of such
amorous works as the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, eleventh century)
and Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise). The third holds that literature serves for
“approving virtue and chastising vice” (kanzen chōaku), meaning that depic-
tions of virtue in literature serve as a model, while depictions of vice warn
against the consequences of wrongdoing. An example of this view is Andō
Tameakira’s (1659–1716) description of how the reader of The Tale of Genji is
meant to evaluate and respond to the virtue and vice displayed by its
characters, even though the text itself does not offer explicit moral judg-
ments. One feature of this theory is that it emphasizes the moral autonomy of
the individual, whose virtuous original nature makes it possible to recognize
vice and reject it, rather than being driven to imitate it.
Itō Jinsai, a Confucian scholar of merchant-class origins who operated a
private academy in Kyoto, criticized Zhu Xi’s division between the original
nature and the material nature, arguing that the material nature is all that

1
Nakamura Yukihiko, “Bakusho sōgakushatachi no bungaku ron,” in Kinsei bungei shichō
kō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1975), 5–8.

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people have, and that Zhu Xi’s notion of an abstract, purely virtuous original
nature ignores the essential role of emotionality in humans. Moreover, Jinsai
saw the theory of the original nature as flawed for implying that moral
perfection can be found by looking inward; he believed that humans innately
possess a basic inclination toward goodness, but that fully formed virtues can
only come about through interactions with others. The cultivation of empa-
thy is an essential part of this process to Jinsai, for example in his interpreta-
tion of the term “considerateness” (shu 恕, J. jo) in Confucian texts, where he
stressed how the term refers to encountering others as people with experi-
ences and emotions different from our own, rather than merely viewing
them as mirrors of ourselves or projections of our own prejudices. For Jinsai,
poetry represented one means for cultivating such sensitivity toward the
emotions of others. He saw this as a crucial role of the Shijing (Book of Odes),
the collection of ancient Chinese poetry that was one of the canonical
Confucian classics, describing it as providing an exhaustive account of the
emotions of the different kinds of people in the world. He tied this view of the
Shijing to an idea of social harmony by arguing that society will fail to
function properly if the natural emotions of the people are not taken into
account. His son and intellectual heir Itō Tōgai (1670–1736) expressed a similar
idea, asserting that poetry gives us the familiarity with human emotions
necessary to interact successfully with others.
Ogyū Sorai shared Jinsai’s belief that Zhu Xi neglected the essential role of
emotionality in human nature, and, like Jinsai, emphasized the role of
empathy in a properly ordered Confucian society. He differed from Jinsai,
though, in defining Confucianism as a philosophy of government to be
studied specifically by the ruling class. He equated the Confucian Way with
the ritual, music, political institutions, and other creations of the sage kings of
ancient China, which he saw as products of human invention, in contrast to
Zhu Xi’s idea of the Way as natural principle. Also significant is how Sorai
portrayed the Way as an external force that shapes human nature, as opposed
to Zhu Xi’s view of the Way as latent in the original nature of humans. Sorai’s
interest in the Way as a tool for government was related to his own status as a
member of the samurai class. He had ties to a number of powerful political
figures, initially rising to prominence while employed as a scholar by
Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658–1714), chamberlain to the shogun Tokugawa
Tsunayoshi (1646–1709; r. 1680–1709), and later carrying out scholarly projects
for the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751; r. 1716–45), as well as
submitting policy proposals meant to assist in Yoshimune’s project of poli-
tical reform.

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Sorai’s poetry in Chinese owed much to the Ancient Phraseology (guwenci,

J. kobunji) movement of the Ming dynasty, particularly the poets Li Panlong
(1514–70) and Wang Shizhen (1526–90). Ancient Phraseology writers sought to
internalize ancient language through the close imitation of a canon of
exemplary prose and poetry from the past. In poetry they primarily took
after the High Tang, with the yuefu ballads of the Han and Wei dynasties also
serving as a model. Sorai inherited both the poetic canon of the Ancient
Phraseology writers and their method of composition, but extended their
theories by seeing the mastery of ancient language not only as the basis for
proper literary composition, but also as a means for understanding the
Confucian Way. He believed that the traces of the Way were to be found
in ancient Chinese texts, making the acquisition of the ancient Chinese
language an urgent task for those in later ages who sought to practice the
Way. He gave an essential role to literary composition in this process,
arguing that people can only achieve true mastery of ancient Chinese if
they actually compose poetry and prose in the language themselves.
Sorai also valued the study of poetry because it brought people outside the
confines of their own experience by exposing them to the emotions of others.
He saw this as an important function of the poems of the Shijing, which he
described as giving the reader access to the experiences of those different
from themselves, such as by allowing the socially lofty to understand the
lowly, and men to understand women. Based on this view of the role of the
Shijing in Confucian learning, he faulted Zhu Xi’s theory of “approving virtue
and chastising vice” for leading readers to impose their own subjective
judgments of right and wrong on poetry, keeping them from expanding
their sensitivity to human emotions and their understanding of human
nature.
Sorai linked empathy to a political ideal of decentralized feudalism, which
he saw as characteristic of ancient China up until the Zhou dynasty, and
contrasted with the centralized bureaucracies of the Qin dynasty and later.
He describes these two forms of political organization as involving funda-
mentally different types of interpersonal relationships, depicting connections
between rulers and ruled in feudalism as like those within a family, char-
acterized by affection and a sense of inseparable bonds between people, as
opposed to the impersonal legalism of centralized bureaucracies. He saw the
Tokugawa bakuhan system as analogous to ancient Chinese feudalism, but
argued that the bakuhan system had been corrupted by the displacement of
the samurai into castle towns, where they lacked contact with the ruled, as
well as being driven to financial ruin by the temptations of a merchant-

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dominated currency economy and its accompanying culture of consumption.

To reverse these trends he proposed that the samurai be returned to the land,
where he believed they would recover the proper familial relationship to the
ruled, as well as being reintegrated into the agricultural economy and
instilled with habits of frugality.
Sorai’s two most prominent disciples, Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759) and
Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), each inherited and developed certain aspects of
his literary thought, while rejecting others. Nankaku, who was the most
famous poet among Sorai’s students, followed the poetic style that Sorai had
inherited from the Ming Ancient Phraseology school. Sorai had combined
this adherence to canonical poetic models with the view that poetry reflects
the truth of human nature and the full range of human experience. For Sorai
these roles of poetry were complementary, not contradictory, a view that
parallels his depiction of the Confucian Way as a nurturing force that, while
demanding adherence to certain standards of behavior, does so without
violating the distinct individual natures with which people are born.
Nankaku, however, defined poetry as something fictional that expresses
not natural emotions, but the culturally constructed emotions that belong
to the world of poetry and poets. Moreover, he maintained that poetry and
other forms of literary writing were the exclusive purview of the educated
stratum of gentlemen (kunshi), and were not something that common people
should be expected to engage with or understand. For Nankaku, poetry was
not a means for fostering understanding between rulers and ruled, but was
instead a tool for cultivating a culturally elite community that stands aloof
from the common world, a notion characteristic of the bunjin (literati) culture
that was gaining force in Japan in the eighteenth century.
Shundai, in contrast, who was the most influential inheritor of Sorai’s ideas
on political economy, shared Sorai’s view that effective governance requires
that rulers understand the emotions of the people, and that poetry is the best
means for gaining such understanding. Shundai was sharply critical, how-
ever, of the poetry of the Ancient Phraseology movement and its followers,
arguing that their approach to composition violated the essential nature of
poetry, which is to be a spontaneous expression of genuinely felt emotions.
He also objected to those who pursued poetry merely as an elegant hobby,
asserting that the sole purpose of the Confucian Way is to govern the state,
and that those who abandon government in favor of purely literary activities
are turning their backs on the true purpose of Confucian scholarship. In
Shundai’s writings on poetry, he tied the loss of authenticity in poetry to the
loss of its political role; when poetry becomes a self-enclosed aesthetic world

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divorced from natural human sentiments, he argued, it no longer forges

connections between people by exposing them to the genuine emotions of
others.
While the Confucian scholars discussed above focused on poetry in
Chinese, a similar discourse emerged at the time in relation to waka. The
ethical and social functions of waka were at the center of the debate over
Kokka hachiron (Eight Essays on Japanese Poetry, 1742), a work produced by
Kada no Arimaro (1706–51), who was employed as a scholar of Japanese
studies by Tayasu Munetake (1715–71), second son of the shogun
Yoshimune. Arimaro’s most controversial claim was that poetry has no
ethical or political function at all. In a rebuttal, Munetake invoked Zhu Xi’s
theory of “approving virtue and chastising vice,” asserting that immoral
poems serve as admonitions against vice, and that the aim of Confucius in
editing the Shijing was to guide people morally. In order to serve such a moral
function, though, he argued that poetry must be genuine, a quality that he
saw as present in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, c. 759),
the earliest anthology of Japanese poetry, but absent in such later waka as the
Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, c. 1205–21),
which Arimaro had praised precisely for how it exemplified poetry as a form
of linguistic play. Munetake eventually requested an opinion on the debate
from Kamo no Mabuchi, who was active as a scholar and teacher of the
Japanese classics in Edo, after earlier spending time in Kyoto studying with
Arimaro’s uncle, Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), a scholar of Shinto and
classical Japanese literature. Mabuchi agreed with Munetake that poetry has a
valuable political role, and like Munetake idealized the poetry of the
Man’yōshū. He criticized Munetake, though, for defining the political role
of poetry in moral terms, arguing that poetry, as an expression of the truth of
emotions just as they are, presents aspects of human experience that fall
outside the narrow confines of the morally defined “principle” of Song
Confucianism, aspects that are moreover essential to governing society.
Poetry aids in the formation of community, Mabuchi explained, but does
this on an emotional level, such as by moderating the unruly emotions that
give rise to social chaos, and by allowing rulers to understand the emotions of
the ruled.
In his later works Mabuchi put forth a philosophy of Japanese cultural
superiority in which he claimed that Japan originally possessed a spontaneous
social harmony and unity with nature that were lacking in China. He
particularly challenged the Sorai school’s view that normative standards for
governing society were first created by the rulers of ancient China, and that

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Japan had remained a barbaric country until it imported Confucian teachings.

The lack of such teachings in ancient Japan, according to Mabuchi, was due to
the fact that virtue was practiced spontaneously there, making explicit
instruction unnecessary. What made this possible, he maintained, was that
the ancient Japanese were “straightforward” (naoshi), a term he used to refer
to a quality of perfect honesty and interpersonal transparency, which he
claimed later fell victim to the artificiality and hypocrisy encouraged by the
rigid rationalism of Chinese ways of thinking.
Mabuchi situated poetry within this view of Japan by depicting waka as the
transparent vehicle through which the ancient Japanese expressed and com-
municated their emotions. He described the ordinary speech of ancient
Japanese as naturally poetic, a quality he saw as having been lost in later
times, when hearts and words had both grown distorted. He encouraged
people of his own time to study the Man’yōshū in order to recover not only
the purity of heart but also the forms of community that had existed in the
Japanese past. He defined part of this task in philological terms, arguing that
ancient poetry offered access to both the language and the mental experi-
ences of ancient Japanese, thus offering a window onto the world of ancient
times. Also important is the inner transformation that people achieve from
studying and composing poetry in the style of the Man’yōshū, in which their
hearts come to be identical with the pure hearts of the ancients, a process that
Mabuchi depicted as a return to a fundamental nature that people of all times
ultimately share. Ancient Japanese poetry, then, allows people to recover the
“straightforward” heart that makes interpersonal transparency and social
harmony possible.
Motoori Norinaga, like Mabuchi, charged Confucianism with leading
Japan astray from its original virtue, claiming that ancient Japan was gov-
erned peacefully without any need for the kind of explicit instruction pro-
vided by Confucianism. Norinaga saw the native Way of Japan as a creation
of the Japanese gods, as opposed to Mabuchi’s equation of the Way with the
spontaneous workings of nature, but otherwise many of their views were
similar. They both saw China’s history of dynastic change as a symptom of its
political instability, contrasting this with the unbroken Japanese imperial line.
In Confucian historiography, the overthrow of dynasties was considered
justified when rulers no longer practiced virtue, but Mabuchi and Norinaga
saw this as an imposition of narrow human reasoning on issues that are
properly determined by forces that transcend such reasoning. Norinaga
claimed that the authority of the Japanese emperors was rooted in their
descent from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and that, as a consequence, the

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emperor must be obeyed unconditionally, without making any judgments

about whether he is good or bad. One might expect Norinaga to object to the
weak position of the emperor within the Tokugawa political order, but he
believed that everything that happens in the world is due to the actions of the
gods, leading him to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that even the
position of the emperor in his time must be the will of the gods.
Much of Norinaga’s career was devoted to the Kojikiden (Transmission of
the Record of Ancient Matters, 1798), a massive commentary on the Kojiki
(Record of Ancient Matters, 712), a mytho-history that describes how the
gods created Japan and became the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line.
His earlier works, however, focused on waka poetry and Heian period
monogatari (tales), especially The Tale of Genji, interests that he never aban-
doned, even as they took a back seat to his Kojiki studies. He criticized
attempts to read waka and monogatari according to standards of Confucian
or Buddhist morality, arguing that such works should instead be judged
according to their own distinctive value system, which is rooted in the
emotional experience he referred to as mono no aware, a term that can be
roughly translated as “pathos.” He emphasized the need to communicate
these emotions to others, portraying poetry not just as an act of isolated
individuals, but as something in which the listener, who must understand the
emotions expressed by the poet, plays an essential role. He described one
benefit of such communication as the insight it gives rulers into the emotions
of the ruled, but went on to extend the same idea to relationships among
commoners themselves, noting that when people understand the emotions
of others, they will treat them properly, thus bringing harmony to society.
This interest in the broader social benefits of poetry, apart from the practice
of rulership, reflects the merchant-class origins of Norinaga and many of his
students, which precluded their participation in government.
For Norinaga, the need to effectively communicate emotions required that
waka adhere to norms of language and feeling shared with the poet’s com-
munity. Explaining why the language of poetry must be consciously crafted,
he argued that the existence of “patterning” (aya) in poetic language, such as
the 5/7 meter of waka and its traditional array of rhetorical techniques, comes
specifically from the need to have others hear our poetry and empathize with
us. He defined mono no aware not only as a form of deep emotional
experience, but also as a form of emotional correctness and discernment, as
reflected in his use of the phrase “knowing mono no aware,” which he
described as the ability to feel the emotions appropriate to each situation,
emotional responses that he saw as shared by all properly sensitive people.

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Norinaga reconciled this normative approach with his idealization of

authentic emotions by distinguishing between two notions of emotional
truth (makoto); one is merely spontaneous feeling, while the other refers to
the underlying truth of human nature. In ancient times, he claimed, there
was no gap between these, as people spontaneously felt the emotions
appropriate to human nature and expressed these effortlessly in poetic
language. In later times, though, people grew alienated from this nature,
so that if they simply composed naturally, based on whatever they hap-
pened to feel, their poetry not only would be flawed from the standpoint of
its linguistic form, but also would express the shallow emotions of a
degraded age. The way to realign ourselves with our true nature, then, is
to immerse ourselves in ancient poetry to the point that we become
transformed by it, leading us to spontaneously feel the same emotions as
those expressed by the ancients. By mediating their emotions through
standards learned through waka, then, people can form a community of
complete emotional authenticity and transparency, resulting in the natural
morality that Norinaga described in his writings on the Way of the Japanese
gods. Norinaga idealized the Shinkokinshū for its self-consciously mediated
approach to the Japanese poetic past, an attitude that he saw as the
necessary starting point for poets of later ages. He also composed in the
style of the Man’yōshū, but valued this anthology less for its aesthetic
qualities than for its benefits to philology, viewing it as offering training
in the oldest forms of the Japanese language, essential for deciphering such
texts as the Kojiki.
Tokugawa scholars of Ancient Learning and Kokugaku rejected earlier
Confucian theories that had focused on the moral content of literature,
instead presenting literature as distinctive for its ability to express emotions.
This was not a simple liberation of emotionality, though, as it was tied to new
ways of imagining the political role of poetry as a tool for inspiring empathy
and for embodying normatively correct ancient cultures. Sorai saw emo-
tional authenticity and cultural form as complementary aspects of poetry that
both helped promote a well-governed society, while his disciples focused on
the conflict between these two sides of poetry. Kokugaku scholars offered a
resolution to this conflict by defining the cultural norms embodied in
Japanese poetic traditions as themselves the very essence of human nature
and the source of authentic emotions. In doing so, they used waka to imagine
a distinctly Japanese form of harmonious community, a view that would
resonate with many forms of Japanese nationalism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.

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 50
Bunjin (literati) and early yomihon:
Nankaku, Nankai, Buson, Gennai,
Teishō, Ayatari, and Akinari
lawrence e. marceau

Drawing inspiration from Chinese role models of cultured intellectuals who

refused or were otherwise unable to participate in political or philosophical
activities due to dissatisfaction with the ruling elite, starting in the Kyōhō era
(1716–35) a number of educated Japanese began devoting their energies
exclusively to self-cultivation in the arts and literature. Such individuals
have been referred to as wenren in Chinese, and this appellation has carried
over into Japanese as bunjin, meaning “lettered/cultured persons,” most
often rendered into English as “literati.”1 Yoshikawa Kōjirō identifies the
Chinese role models for Japanese bunjin as originating in circles of artists and
poets such as that revolving around Yang Weizhen (1296–1370). These wen-
ren, located in South China during the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties in
the fourteenth century, were cut off from politics and thus focused their
talents on literary and artistic matters to the exclusion of all else. John
Timothy Wixted develops this argument further:

In the Northern Song, the ideal of the tripartite unity of literature, philoso-
phy, and political affairs reached its zenith in figures like Ouyang Xiu
(1007–72), Wang Anshi (1021–86), and Su Shi (1036–1101), who were outstand-
ing in all three areas . . . Yang Weizhen and others, like the famous painter Ni
Zan (1301–74), had no ties to philosophy or statecraft. Instead, they made
their lives as artists supreme, divorced from politics and manifesting varying
degrees of eccentricity or deviation from accepted norms. Society of the time
accorded them respect. And their elevation of literature or art, which was
new to Chinese society (where, if anything, literature had been viewed as less
important than statecraft and philosophy), became a pattern. The wenren
1
In China the term shi (士) and in Yi dynasty Korea the term yangban (両班) commu-
nicated the sense of literati as referring to the educated elite classes. Tokugawa Japan,
being controlled by a military elite, resorted to other terms, such as bushi (武士) and buke
(武家).

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 Bunjin (literati) and early yomihon

ideal also carried the expectation of simultaneous proficiency, at least to

some degree, in poetry-writing, painting, and calligraphy. (Wixted, 392)

This stance of distancing oneself from the political realm of governance and
focusing instead on creative efforts, in particular the composition of prose
and poetry, finds proponents in Japan during the first half of the eighteenth
century.
After a century of spectacular economic growth that accompanied the
political stability under Tokugawa military hegemony, stagnation set in and
the structures that supported the regime began to show signs of strain. The
eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751, r. 1716–45), instituted a
series of political, economic, financial, and social programs known as the
Kyōhō Reforms, and achieved remarkable success in some areas, arguably
keeping the regime from collapsing altogether. These reforms included
relaxation of restrictions on the importation of books from China and
Europe, which allowed for increased access to recent developments in
China and Europe regarding materia medica and other sources of knowledge
that could yield practical applications. Along with such utilitarian books,
essays by Chinese wenren, guides to painting in “Southern” styles that
promoted cultivation of the amateur individual at the expense of adherence
to “Northern” professional academic styles, and anthologies of fiction that
explored worlds of the strange and bizarre also entered in great numbers the
libraries of domain lords and wealthy merchants, not to mention the inven-
tories of entrepreneurial booksellers.
The critical writings of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), one of the most original
and influential early modern Japanese intellectuals, also helped set the stage
for the emergence of a bunjin consciousness. While Sorai was profoundly
concerned about making Confucian thought more authentically relevant as
the foundation of interpersonal relations, social harmony, and effective
governance, his stance regarding poetry (and, by extension, other literary
and creative activity) served to liberate literary writing from the strictures of
the moralistic Cheng-Zhu school of Song Confucian thought that was
promoted by the Tokugawa regime. Sorai wrote that the Shijing or Book
of Odes, one of the canonized Confucian Five Classics, “is simply something
along the lines of the waka poetry of this country. It is not something for
discoursing upon the principles of governing the heart or the self, nor is it
something for discoursing upon the Way of Governing the provinces and
the realm. The Odes . . . allow our hearts to reach out naturally and grasp
human emotions” (Flueckiger, 100-1).

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Here we find Sorai arguing against a didactic view of literary practice, a

perspective held by followers of the Cheng-Zhu and other Confucian schools.
While Sorai nevertheless emphatically supported a role for literature in the
cultivation of a Confucian gentleman (J. kunshi), trained to support the ruler
in ordering the realm, his release of literary practice from the strictures of
exclusively didactic readings paved the way for other scholars and artists to
pursue creative activities for their own purposes, regardless of whether or not
their actions would be applied in support of the dominant power structure.
Sorai’s disciple Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759) took his teacher’s thought a step
further. After resigning from his post as an advisor to the regime in 1718, he
constructed an identity as a Taoist recluse, while still living in the Edo
metropolis. The following heptasyllabic regulated verse serves as an example
of his poetry in Chinese, and has been identified as an exploration of a
reclusive ideal, appropriating allusions from Tao Qian’s (365–427) prose
essay and poem on the “Peach Blossom Spring” (Ch. Taohua yuan):
Moving to the North of the City
For ten years my humble gate has stood west of the red river
I have moved house, and still am within the secluded valley
The nearby dogs and chickens know the shabby streets
Swallows and sparrows follow along, yet roost in my former home
I want to escape the dust of the world, but it is hard to avoid company
I am chagrined that by planting peaches and damsons, the path has
become easy to pass
If the spring trees would just gradually block it off
It would surely be like how the blossom spring confounded its visitor
(Flueckiger, 126)

The poem encourages the reader to join the poet in imagining an idealized
Taoist utopia. It is important to note here that, while Japan has a long
tradition of eremitic literature, Nankaku’s generation was the first to turn
their training in the Chinese and Japanese classics toward “private” pursuits,
and to use their knowledge in favor of imaginary realms instead of applying
their efforts in service of the Tokugawa regime and the structures that
supported it.
Another early Confucian advisor who attempted to embody bunjin ideals
of aloof refinement in his life and work is Gion Nankai (1676/7–1751). Nankai’s
experience differs from Nankaku’s in that Nankai did not resign but was
punished for a certain infraction and kept under house arrest for ten years.
Although he returned to service after his pardon, Nankai seems to have
maintained a strong sense of resistance to the whims of those in power

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throughout the rest of his life. Identified today as one of the early pioneers of
painting in the bunjin style, Nankai also composed poetry in the persona of
someone living in rustic harmony with nature. The following heptasyllabic
regulated verse, “The Fisherman” (Gyofu), is a good example:

The Fisherman
With only a straw hat, a cloak, and a fishing pole
He never travels in a horse carriage, and no courtier hat rests on his head.
He spends his entire life simply riding the misty waves,
While in his cups he never feels the chill of wind and snow.
Roosting herons, sleeping seagulls: these are his companions.
White and red floating weeds – where are the rapids?
But stop talking about the dangers of boating on rivers and lakes!
Look! The journey through this world is far more difficult.2

Nankai is important as a bunjin, not only for his skill in painting and poetry
following the ideals of the Chinese scholar-amateur, but also for his early
promotion of eccentricity and deviation from social norms. One example of
his promotion of “eccentricity” (奇, “out of kilter,” or the related character
畸, “out of the ordinary,” both read as Ch. ji or qi; J. ki) is found in his
collection of random jottings entitled Shōun sango (Cupfuls of Words from
the Clouds of the Xiang River). Here eccentricity is used to describe a quality
people of distinction should develop in order to attain a higher degree of self-
cultivation.
For Nankai, eccentricity was not an aim, but rather part of what it meant to
be fully cultivated. Later we find, however, that eccentricity, or the attain-
ment of kijin (畸人) status, became increasingly recognized as one of the
prized attributes of being a bunjin. By the second half of the eighteenth
century, opportunities for personal cultivation spread beyond the stratum of
warrior-class elites and extended to lower-echelon bushi, well-to-do mer-
chants, and members of religious institutions who were academically
inclined.
Recognized as the first Japanese transmitter of the practice of drinking
steeped leaf green tea known as sencha, which had entered from China in the
seventeenth century, the Ōbaku (Ch. Huangbo) Zen monk Gekkai Genshō
(1675–1763) refused to lead a sedentary life as a temple prelate, but instead
brewed and sold tea on the street corners of Kyoto (in violation of official
regulations), thereby gaining a reputation as an eccentric. Generally known
2
Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), 386.

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by the townspeople of Kyoto as Baisa-ō, or “Old Tea Seller,” Genshō engaged

in deep discussions with anyone who would stop by his tea stall and listen to
him, along the way generating close relationships with prominent Kyoto
cultural figures such as bunjin artist Ike no Taiga (1723–76), artist Itō Jakuchū
(1716–1800), and poet and Buddhist abbot Daiten (Baisō Kenjō, 1719–1801).
The modern scholar Nakamura Yukihiko has identified four characteristics
of bunjin:
1. Versatility. Bunjin were in many cases polymaths who excelled in multi-
ple martial and civil arts.
2. Antagonism to zoku or the unrefined or vulgar, including the overtly
commercial.
3. Eremitism. For many early modern bunjin, their withdrawal or seclusion
from society tended to be more psychological than physical.
4. Aloof idealism. This self-righteous feature of the early modern bunjin
tended to hurt their reputations, both among their peers and in their
subsequent receptions. They stubbornly held to their individualistic
values, however, often in the face of conflicting social norms. (Marceau,
5–6)
Among the dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals who decided (or were
obligated) to step away from social engagement and follow a life devoted to
literary and artistic endeavors, five stand out: Yosa Buson (1716–83), Tsuga
Teishō (1718–after 1794), Takebe Ayatari (1719–74), Hiraga Gennai (1728–80),
and Ueda Akinari (1734–1809). All five share Nakamura’s four bunjin attri-
butes of versatile creativity, antagonism to zoku, eremitism (often in the
city), and aloof idealism, and all created works that continue to attract readers
and viewers today. Furthermore, all five created legacies in their various
areas of pursuit that generated new genres or continued to inspire like-
minded followers for generations to come, up to the present.
Yosa (Yoza) Buson (1716–84) – as a haikai poet, he usually employed his poetic
name without a surname; as a painter, he is best known for signing his works
with a Chinese-style two-character name, Sha In, or “Tiger of Yosa hamlet” –
was born and raised in the Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka) region of western Japan.
Little is known of his family background or childhood, but in his twentieth year
he traveled to Edo in order to study haikai, eventually becoming a disciple of
Hayano Hajin (1676–1742), follower of the Bashō haikai lineage and leader of the
Yahantei, or “Midnight Arbor,” school of haikai in Edo.
Buson returned to the Kamigata region in 1751, residing most of the rest of
his life in Kyoto. There he developed his skills as a painter in the bunjinga or

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literati painting style, and today he and his Kyoto contemporary Ike no Taiga
(1723–76) are regarded as the greatest masters of this style, which is indebted to
a range of influences from the Asian continent. While Buson made his living as
a painter he continued to practice haikai, forming a haikai study group, the
Sankasha, with painting clients and poetry disciples in 1766, and eventually
reviving the Yahantei with himself as successor to Hajin’s title in 1770.
One important element found in Buson’s poetics as well as in his com-
ments on painting is his notion of “transcending the ordinary.” In the preface
to a memorial anthology of verses by his disciple Kuroyanagi Shōha (1727–71),
Buson writes as follows:

Haikai is that which has as its ideal the use of zokugo (ordinary language), yet
transcends zoku (the ordinary world). To transcend zoku yet make use of
zoku, the method of rizoku (離俗; transcending the ordinary) is the most
difficult. It is the thing that So-and-So Zen master spoke of: “Listen to the
sound of the Single Hand,” in other words haikai Zen, the principle of
rizoku. (Crowley, 48)

For Buson, haikai poetry depends on using haigon, or vocabulary taken from
everyday life or derived from Chinese words, as opposed to the insistence in
conventional waka poetics on the exclusive use of words taken from the
Japanese classics, such as the Kokin wakashū (Collection of Ancient and
Modern Poems, c. 905–14) and the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji,
eleventh century). The poet should be free to use a zoku lexicon, but still
generate poems that express a heightened or transcendent spirit, one that
avoids falling into vulgarity. In order to arrive at his conclusion, Buson draws
from teachings found in his other area of expression, painting. He states in the
same preface:

Painters have the theory of “Avoiding zoku:” “To avoid the zoku in painting,
there is no other way but to read many texts, that is to say, both books and
scrolls, which causes the ki (Ch. qi, ‘material force’) to rise, as commercialism
and vulgarity cause ki to fall. The student should be careful about this.” To
avoid zoku in painting as well, they caused their students to put down the
brush and read books. (Crowley, 49)

Buson here is drawing from Wang Gai’s (1645–1707) Jieziyuan huazhuan

(Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, J. Kaishien gaden), a heavily
influential handbook for students of painting in the untrammeled bunjin or
wenren styles, first published in China in the mid seventeenth century, and
later reprinted in Japan. The Manual focuses on the importance for artists of

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avoiding the banal or commonplace (especially activities related to the

marketplace), and elevating their qi through reading and studying the texts
of the past.
One celebrated hokku by Buson dates from the third lunar month of 1774:
Na no hana ya / Tsuki wa higashi ni / Hi wa nishi ni
Rapeseed blossoms – / The moon is in the east / The sun is in the west

This verse, with its depiction of a field of bright yellow rapeseed blossoms
in late spring, combines the visual nature of a painting with an image of the
poet looking to the east to find a waxing moon rising and then looking to the
west to see the sun as it sets. Scholars have identified literary references to
poems in Chinese by Tao Qian and in Japanese by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro
(c. seventh century), and even to a folk song from Tango province, but the
verse also succeeds without reference to earlier poems. The pastoral setting
and the presence of not just one but two heavenly bodies provide the reader/
listener with a sense of immediacy as well as with an opportunity to
contemplate the human place in the cosmos.
Born and raised in Osaka, Tsuga Teishō (1718–after 1794) lived in Kyoto for
several years in his youth, studying calligraphy and seal carving (tenkoku)
from Niioki/Niō Mōsho (1687–1755), sencha and incense appreciation from
Ōeda Ryūhō (d. 1751), and Chinese medicine from Kagawa Shūan (1683–1755).
Teishō was most active in four discrete but interrelated areas, Chinese
medicine (the means by which he earned his living), calligraphy and seal
carving, Chinese language scholarship, and literary production, in particular
the adaptation of vernacular Chinese stories from the Ming and Qing dynas-
ties (1368–1912) into Japanese settings. As a China scholar and linguist, Teishō
published a compendium of Chinese seals found in imported texts called the
Zen Tōmei fu (Complete Directory of Chinese Names, c. 1741), and an edition
of the massive dictionary of Chinese characters, the Kangxi zidian (J. Kōki jiten,
1716; Teishō’s edition was published in 1780), that corrects some nine hundred
citation errors in the original.
Teishō’s most enduring achievement from a literary perspective is his
trilogy of Kokon kidan (Strange Tales, Past and Present), a collection of
twenty-seven stories published under three titles in Osaka in 1749, 1766, and
1786, although a draft of all of the stories seems to have been completed and
submitted to the publisher, the Shōkōdō, Kashiwaraya Seiemon, in 1744 or
1745. These three collections, Hanabusa sōshi (A Garland of Heroes), Shigeshige
yawa (Flourishing in the Wilds), and Hitsujigusa (Bundled Weeds of Words)
follow a process of hon’an or adaptation and naturalization, taking tales from

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Chinese collections, such as the San yan (Three Words, J. Sangen, compiled in
the late Ming by Feng Menglong, 1574–1645), and relocating them in a
Japanese setting, often the world of the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace,
c. 1370), a work inspired by the efforts of the emperor GoDaigo (1288–1339;
r. 1318–39) to wrest political power from the Kamakura military regime,
which resulted in the period of the Northern and Southern Courts in the
fourteenth century.
Teishō’s collections, particularly the first, were identified by later writers
such as Ōta Nanpo (1749−1823) as the earliest examples of what has subse-
quently become known as the yomihon, a specific genre of narrative fiction. In
Teishō’s yomihon plot, characterization, and writing style were developed to
a much higher degree than in publications that had heretofore been circulat-
ing, that is, the ukiyo-zōshi, in particular those of the Hachimonjiya firm of
Kyoto. Teishō may not have intended his works to initiate a new genre, but
his experimentation with adapting and naturalizing Chinese sources proved
to change the practice of serious fiction writing in Japan.
While Teishō generally lived aloof from broader society and devoted
himself to maintaining the company of close friends across a range of artistic
and cultural pursuits, his fictional works did not follow a pattern of escapist
entertainment. We can detect, in fact, a strong moral stance running through
his stories. This moral position seems to stand in accord with Ogyū Sorai’s
writings on statecraft, and we can acknowledge Teishō’s close relationship
with the Sorai school in the fact that his first published text was the preface to
an unauthorized collection of Sorai’s essays on Japanese history, literature,
and language, the Sorai-sensei kasei dan (Master Sorai’s Discourses on What
Should Be, 1736), a work he also edited. Teishō’s stories recount historical
events and critique them from perspectives consonant with those found in
Sorai’s writings. For example, in the first story included in his 1749 Hanabusa
sōshi, “Emperor GoDaigo Thrice Rejects Fujifusa’s Remonstrance,” the
emperor is depicted as being highly knowledgeable about textual details
and skilled at rhetorical technique, but lacking in the wisdom required in
order to rule the realm. His rejection of the various counsels offered by his
loyal minister, Madenokōji Fujifusa, results in the imminent end of his reign,
as well as Fujifusa’s withdrawal from public life to take a high moral stance as
a bunjin recluse. Perspectives such as this run through Teishō’s stories,
providing readers with plots, characterizations, and language that maintain
their interest. At the same time, however, these works are also tempered
with a moral and critical stance deriving from the author’s detached position
as an independent scholar-artist or bunjin.

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Takebe Ayatari (1719–74) was born the second son to a line serving as
hereditary “house elders” or chief retainers to the lord of the Hirosaki domain
in the far northern province of Tsugaru. Known as Kitamura Kingo
Hisamura, Ayatari came from a distinguished line of martial strategists and
thinkers, counting as his paternal grandmother the daughter of the military
theorist and Shinto scholar Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), and as his mother the
daughter of Sokō’s prominent disciple and military strategist in his own right
Daidōji Yūzan (1639–1730). Raised in a house that prided itself on both military
and administrative strength, Ayatari as a youth is said to have excelled at
spear-wielding as well as at the composition of poetry in Chinese. His life
circumstances changed radically when in 1738 he left his family and traveled
to Kyoto, eventually taking the tonsure as a Sōtō Zen monk, and living
temporarily in Edo, the Chichibu region, Kyoto, and Kanazawa. Over the
course of his travels Ayatari interacted with haikai poets from the Shōmon
(Bashō), Mino, and Ise schools, eventually establishing himself in Asakusa,
Edo, as an Ise school master, employing the studio name Kyūroan (“Dew-
Inhaling Hermitage”) and sobriquet Ryōtai (“Cool Sack”). During this time
Ayatari developed a close relationship with the innovative bunjin painter and
haikai poet Sakaki Hyakusen (1697–1752), a friendship that propelled Ayatari
in the direction of the Nagasaki style of Chinese painting, originally brought
to Japan by the merchant/painter Shen Nanpin (J. Shin Nanpin, 1682–?).
Ayatari traveled to Nagasaki twice, and received training in landscape as
well as bird-and-flower painting from Nanpin’s Chinese and Japanese dis-
ciples. In 1763 Ayatari developed an interest in ancient Japan, enrolling in
Kamo no Mabuchi’s (1697–1769) school of ancient Japanese scholarship, and
rejecting contemporary haikai poetics in favor of a long-abandoned form of
poetry called the katauta (half song). By the end of his life (1774), Ayatari had
left a legacy of prodigious literary and artistic production in the genres of
Chinese-style painting, haikai-informed haiga painting and book illustration,
poetry in several forms, poetic travel accounts, essays, edited haikai collec-
tions, and narrative fiction, which would later serve to inspire writers such as
Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin (1767–1848).
Ayatari’s major works include the Kan’yōsai gafu (Cold-Leaf Studio
Painting Manual, 1762–4), the first painting manual in the Nagasaki-school
Chinese style to include the artist’s own works; the haikai compilation Kokon
haikai meidai shū (Collection of Haikai, Old and New, on Clear Topics,
1763–4); the collection of vignettes across the four seasons Oriorigusa (Tales
from Now and Again, 1771); and the works of fiction Nishiyama monogatari
(Tale of the Western Hills, 1768) and Honchō Suikoden (A Water Margin in this

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Realm, part 1, 1773; part 2 incomplete, 1774). In a comparison with the works of
Tsuga Teishō, Nishiyama monogatari has been described by Emanuel Pastreich
as “not a rendering of a vernacular Chinese novel but a result of the experi-
ments in language encouraged by the reception of vernacular Chinese novels
. . . It can be seen as a continuation of the experiments associated with [Teishō
and others] who composed in vernacular Chinese language. Nishiyama mono-
gatari is more than a popular tale, it is a self-conscious literary work on a topic
not previously considered literary” (Pastreich, 281).
In Ayatari’s final major work of fiction, Honchō Suikoden, about which the
master of the yomihon genre of narrative fiction, Kyokutei Bakin, later wrote
an extended critique, we can detect a sophisticated engagement with the
issue of Sino-Japanese interaction: “Ayatari may not have articulated his ideas
as to how to position texts in Japanese vis-à-vis those in Chinese. Yet in
Honchō Suikoden, we . . . see a problematization of the [Sino-Japanese] binary
in the unique setting of the transnational travel and relocation, which one
might say anticipates the scholarly sophistication and ideological charging
of the dichotomy that was yet to fully materialize” (Sakaki, 56). Here we
discover the ramifications of Ayatari’s treatment regarding the fictional
escape of the Tang emperor Xuanzong’s (J. Gensō, 685–762) consort, Yang
Guifei (J. Yō Kihi, 719–56), from Tang China to Nara period Japan in the 770s.
In the process she transforms from a monolingual Chinese, considered
barbaric by the locals because they do not comprehend her language, to a
bilingual who is accepted as “Japanese.” Ayatari’s work posits that “the
bilingualism of the cultivated Japanese . . . is revealed to be superior to the
monolingualism of the Chinese,” and furthermore that “a command of not
only the literary language . . . but also the vernacular language . . . disturbs
the whole binary of the native/foreign, the spoken/written, and the natural/
cultural” (Sakaki, 63–4). Ayatari’s ability to transcend conventional notions of
what prose, poetry, and painting should be derived directly from his bunjin
consciousness, and served as strong forces for change in these forms of
expression for those who followed.
Like Ayatari, Hiraga Gennai (1728–80) was born into the bushi or martial
class, but, unlike his elder contemporary, his family ranked as foot soldiers,
and his father held the minor post of keeper of the rice warehouses for the
Takamatsu domain, in the province of Sanuki on Shikoku. While Teishō and
Ayatari were trained in the Chinese and Japanese classics, and had some
familiarity with vernacular Chinese as it appeared in recently imported Ming
and Qing texts, Gennai was trained in materia medica or the study of medicinal
herbs (J. honzōgaku), which was a field of study requiring knowledge not only

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of Japanese and Chinese, but also of Dutch. He studied in Nagasaki, where he

presumably received his first real introduction to European texts, scientific
instruments, and other aspects of the culture. Gennai later left his domain for
Edo, where he continued studying materia medica under the prominent
scholar and physician Tamura Ransui (1718–76). In 1761 Gennai requested,
and was granted, release from his position with the domain, a move that
enabled him to engage in scientific and entrepreneurial activities unhindered
by official duties. Gennai, Ransui, and others organized five events between
1757 and 1762 in which a variety of materials and products from all parts of
Japan were placed on display and their potentials for medical and economic
development discussed. Gennai’s efforts in this regard resulted in the compi-
lation and publication of one of the most important non-fiction works he was
to produce, a compendium of 360 varieties of products, Butsurui hinshitsu
(Classification of Various Materials, 1763).
Gennai also adapted the humorous sermon genre called dangibon that was
popular at the time, and infused it with a level of social satire heretofore
unseen, providing a completely uninhibited description of society that revo-
lutionized the genre. His most successful dangibon are Nenashigusa (Rootless
Grass, 1763, sequel 1769) and Fūryū Shidōken den (The Modern Life of
Shidōken, 1763). The first work satirizes contemporary society by having
Enma (Ch. Yama), the fearsome judge and king of the underworld, become
infatuated with a prominent kabuki actor of female roles. Enma plots
unsuccessfully to have the actor drown so he would be able to join him in
the underworld. The second work follows the eponymous character on a
series of fantastic journeys to other realms, each exposing a paradox or
inconsistency found in contemporary society. The works together estab-
lished Gennai’s fame, not only as a scholar and entrepreneur, but also as a
writer of wit with a keen sense of social consciousness.
Gennai engaged in groundbreaking work in other fields as well, experi-
menting with static electricity for medical purposes, developing fire retardant
asbestos cloth from domestic sources, designing ceramics, making a thermo-
meter, raising sheep for wool, writing plays for the puppet theater, promot-
ing mining, painting in a European-inspired style, and otherwise attempting
to develop a number of economic and cultural initiatives. Most of these
eluded success, and Gennai’s later works, including his tour-de-force Hōhi-ron
(“On Farting” or “A Theory of Farting”, 1774, sequel 1777), reveal an increas-
ing sense of frustration with the sociopolitical order. As Sumie Jones explains,
“(Hōhi-ron) stands out among all of Gennai’s works for its bitterness of tone.
His frustration about being blocked from opportunities to exercise his many

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talents and to make a name for himself appears here in its barest form”
(Jones, 392).
Gennai apparently became increasingly frustrated as time went on, and he
eventually was involved in an incident in which one person was killed and
another injured, for which he was arrested. About a month later he died in
captivity. Gennai departed from the bunjin pattern of Sinophilia and keeping
an aloof distance from the gritty issues of the day, instead exerting his time,
effort, finances, and reputation in a number of attempts to strengthen the
economy and social structure he found so deficient. However, we can detect
in his openness to new ideas, his attempts to experiment with new tech-
niques, and his prodigious talent in a range of literary and artistic pursuits a
strong affinity with his bunjin contemporaries.
Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) was born in Osaka to a woman named Osaki who
hailed from the Matsuo family, originally from Yamato province. We do not
know the identity of his father, and neither, apparently, did he. In his fourth
year Ueda Mosuke, a wealthy merchant of paper and vegetable oil in the
Dōjima district of central Osaka, adopted Akinari and raised him in substan-
tial comfort and with a good education, possibly at the Kaitokudō, a private
academy for the merchant class that had been established in the city. While
he survived a brush with death from having contracted smallpox in his fifth
year of age, Akinari was left with some fingers stunted on both hands. He
nevertheless went on to develop his skills in calligraphy, and his distinctive
calligraphic style was prized even in his lifetime.
Akinari as a youth engaged in haikai, a socially oriented pastime he
continued to enjoy over his entire life. He briefly studied the Japanese classics
and antiquarian issues under Takebe Ayatari, but expressed dissatisfaction
with Ayatari’s seeming lack of knowledge concerning Chinese characters,
and through Ayatari’s efforts, in the mid 1760s, he was introduced to the
scholar Katō Umaki (1721–77), one of the foremost disciples of Kamo no
Mabuchi’s school of Japanese classical studies. Akinari had great respect for
Umaki’s scholarship and character, and maintained direct contact and corre-
spondence with him until his death about a decade later. (Incidentally,
Ayatari and Hiraga Gennai had also joined the roster of Mabuchi’s disciples
in the same ninth lunar month of 1763.)
After his adoptive father’s death in 1761, Akinari inherited the family
business, maintaining it until a devastating fire in 1771 left him in search of
a new livelihood. In the 1760s he had published a couple of works in the
ukiyo-zōshi vein, Shodō kikimimi seken zaru (Worldly Monkeys Proficient in
All Sorts of Ways, 1766), followed the next year by a second, Seken tekake

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katagi (Characters of Worldly Mistresses, 1767). In 1768 he had completed the

first draft of and preface to his most well-known work, Ugetsu monogatari
(Tales of Moonlight and Rain), but close examination of the woodblock-
printed text reveals that the blocks for much of at least the first couple of
stories in the collection had been carved away and that Akinari had con-
ducted extensive revisions of the text. By the time the collection was pub-
lished in 1776, Akinari had become deeply involved in matters Chinese,
studying medicine (his new profession after having lost his business), and
presumably learning techniques of hon’an or adaptation and naturalization of
Chinese works into Japanese settings from Tsuga Teishō, who by that time
had already published two of his trilogy of what would later become known
as early yomihon.
Ugetsu monogatari successfully combines Chinese and Japanese classical
(and more recent) sources and infuses them with an atmosphere that allows
readers to appreciate the text as literary entertainment, while at the same
time challenging them to reach beyond the tales themselves and reflect on
how the narratives compare with the world of the here-and-now they
encounter around them. In order to accomplish this, not only does Akinari
go beyond what a reader might find in the “source” narratives in terms of plot
elements or characterization, but he employs a particular writing style that
combines both Japanese and Chinese elements, known as wakan konkōbun, or
“hybrid Sino-Japanese prose.” This style infuses the text with a sense of
richness and reverberation that had eluded the earlier yomihon by Teishō
or Ayatari.
Akinari continued to engage in research on the Japanese classics, writing
and often publishing studies of the Man’yōshū (late eighth century), the Ise
monogatari (The Tales of Ise), and the Genji monogatari. He also compiled a
treatise on the kireji or “cutting words” that generate a pause or caesura in
haikai verses. Today the most prominent expression of Akinari’s scholarship
is probably his celebrated debates with the foremost scholar of Japanese
antiquities of his generation, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Akinari took
issue with two aspects of Norinaga’s scholarship: first, his belief that the
archaic Japanese language of the distant past had been “pure” and not
“corrupted” by imported pronunciations from continental Asia; and second,
that the ancestral deity of the imperial line, Amaterasu, and the sun in the sky
were one and the same. In this series of debates that seems to have been
conducted through correspondence over the period 1785–7 Norinaga defends
himself against Akinari’s attacks with the prodigious scale of textual exegesis
that he had built up over the years since he had first begun a systematic

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reading and annotation of the Kojiki (712) in 1764. Akinari unfortunately did
not possess the analytical or linguistic tools to challenge Norinaga effectively
concerning these two issues, but in terms of approaching Japan’s ancient
history he has been praised for his cultural relativism, his open mind, and his
unbiased attitudes, in strong contrast to Norinaga’s xenophobic ideology.
Akinari put his ideas about cultural relativism into practice. In 1764, he was
able to engage in a discussion in written classical Chinese with members of
the Korean Embassy to Japan that had arrived in Osaka. Late in life he wrote
with a special type of stylus called an adan (screw pine, Pandanus fascicularis),
which originated from the Ryūkyū Kingdom. In contrast, a portrait of Akinari
said to date from 1808 survives with him seated informally and playing a
tonkori, a five-stringed instrument used by the Ainu of the far north.
Furthermore, Akinari is known for his research into sencha, the practice of
preparing and serving brewed tea in the contemporary Chinese style, and his
Seifū sagen (Miscellaneous Comments on the Way of Pure Elegance, 1794) is
today considered one of the important texts that helped popularize sencha
among bunjin and bunjin aspirants for the next century.
Late in life, Akinari suffered several setbacks, including the death of his
wife and confidant of thirty-seven years, Koren (1740–98), as well as severe
loss of sight in both eyes. He is often depicted as impoverished, bitter, and
alone in the years before his death, but we can see that, in spite of his
difficulties, those around him went to pains to take care of him, and in 1805
(with expanded editions in 1806 and 1807) his disciples and supporters pub-
lished an anthology of his waka verses as well as his non-fiction Japanese
prose, with the title Tsuzurabumi (A Basket of Books). In the last few years of
his life, Akinari also completed a series of critical observations of those
around him called Tandai shōshin roku (A Record of Audacity and
Circumspection, c. 1808), which reveals Akinari’s opinions on a variety of
matters to a surprising degree.
Akinari had not given up fiction writing either. His collection of stories in a
pseudo-classic style, Harusame monogatari (Tales of the Spring Rain, 1808,
revised but incomplete, 1809), has eluded the nearly universal praise that his
earlier Ugetsu monogatari has garnered, but many of its stories are considered
to be quite good. A quote from Akinari’s preface to Harusame monogatari can
provide a sense, not only of his craft, but of the state of a bunjin mind in the
middle decades of early modern Japan:

For some days the spring rain has been falling, quiet and delightful. Once
again I have taken out my brush and inkstone, but as I ponder what to write I

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realize that I have nothing to say. For the first time, I have chosen as models
the tales of the past; but for me, whose life is that of a wretched mountain
woodcutter, what sort of story is best to relate? Stories of the past and present
that I have heard from others, and believed, I now in turn pass on, unaware
that they are fabrications, and that I deceive those who read them. But it
matters not. There will be those who accept as true accounts the made-up
stories I continue to tell: so saying to myself I go on with this collection, and
the spring rain still is falling, falling. (Chambers, 376)

Akinari’s alter-ego narrator here suggests to the reader that the author lives in
unfettered solitude, engaged in reading, pondering the passing of time, and
putting tales and poems down on paper. The author should not be imposing
issues of truth and falsehood on the reader; rather the reader must adjudicate
the veracity of a tale and its contents. In this way, the author identifies with
the spring rain as it falls in complete accord with nature. What we do with
that rain is ultimately up to us. The bunjin lived in a world set if not physically
then psychologically apart from society. Using the tools of self-expression
across a range of creative activities, they fabricated an alternative existence
that allowed them to fantasize an idealized society. The ground they broke
allowed others to develop the genres of painting, poetry, and prose in future
generations, even when those professional writers, poets, and painters could
no longer live according to the ideal their bunjin predecessors were able to
generate.

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 51
Satiric poetry: Kyōshi, Kyōka, and Senryū
haruo shirane

Three relatively new genres – kyōshi (comic Chinese poetry), kyōka (comic
waka), and senryū (satiric haiku) – came to the fore in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, at the same time as fictional forms such as dangibon (satiric
sermons), kokkeibon (books of humor), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), and
kibyōshi (yellow picture books). The simultaneous growth of “wild” (kyō) or
comic literature in the An’ei-Tenmei era (1772–89) has been partially attributed
to the lax rule of Senior Councilor Tanuma Okitsugu (r. 1772–86), who did not
enforce the restraints placed on social customs during the Kyōhō Reforms of
the first half of the eighteenth century. More importantly, these poetic genres
were part of a broader rise of satirical literature.

Kyōshi
Pioneers of the early eighteenth-century bunjin movement, such as Gion
Nankai (1677–1751) and Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759), turned away from a
contemporary society that had disappointed them and entered the elegant
and largely imaginary world of Chinese poetry and culture. These bunjin
poets did not criticize the society around them so much as ignore it. Indeed,
those following the Ogyū Sorai school, like Hattori Nankaku, had little
opportunity to express their social or political dissatisfaction except through
elegant Chinese poetry. It was in this context that an alternative mindset, that
of the “mad person” (kyōsha), emerged. Not only did the “mad person”
criticize and mock contemporary society, he also criticized and laughed at
himself. This persona has a long history in Japan, with roots in Buddhist and
Confucian traditions. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, samurai
intellectuals who considered themselves “mad” turned not to the elegant
forms of expression advocated by the Sorai school but to the comic genres of
kyōbun (comic Chinese prose) and kyōshi (comic Chinese poetry), two genres
that became an integral part of popular gesaku (playful) literature.

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By the eighteenth century, Japanese literati had naturalized the medium of

Chinese poetry (kanshi), adapting it to their own tastes and needs. In the
process, kyōshi, which concentrated on social satire, wordplay, and vulgar
topics such as fornication, farting, fleas, and itching, emerged as a counter-
genre, standing in a similar relationship to orthodox kanshi as kyōka did to
classical waka. Kyōshi had a long history, which can be traced to Chinese
poetry and medieval Gozan (Five Mountains) Zen kanshi, such as the kyōshi
of the medieval “mad” monk poet Ikkyū (1394–1481). Kyōshi, however,
reached its high point in the twenty years between 1770 and 1790, especially
in the Tenmei era (1781–8), precisely when senryū, kyōka, and kibyōshi
blossomed. Like senryū, kyōshi humorously explored vulgar topics that lay
outside the bounds of orthodox literature. Kyōshi also mixed classical and
contemporary Chinese vocabulary and sometimes even contained vernacu-
lar interlineation (offering alternative kana readings).
Significantly, “mad” poet-intellectuals used these genres to express frustra-
tion and discontent with contemporary social conditions. Two pioneers were
Dōmyaku Sensei (1752–1801, Master Artery) and Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823); the
latter’s kyōka pen-name was Yomo no Akara and his kyōshi pen-name was
Neboke Sensei (Master Groggy). Nanpo, from Edo, became famous for his
humor and his literary parodies, while Dōmyaku Sensei, a noted kibyōshi and
kyōka writer from Kyoto, became known for his social criticism and satire.
The publication of Nanpo’s collection Neboke sensei bunshū (Master Groggy’s
Literary Collection) in 1767 and Dōmyaku Sensei’s Taihei gafu (Ballads for the
Age of Great Peace) in 1769 firmly established the reputations of both writers,
who were then still in their teens, and made them masters of the new genre in
the Edo and Kyoto regions, respectively.
The following two kyōshi are from Dōmyaku Sensei’s Taihei gafu, with the
second addressed to Ōta Nanpo:

Kyoto Minor Retainer

Most of these minor samurai draw a stipend of three koku –
So how come they act so big?
From head to toe, they’re a mass of unmitigated gall.
At the theater, they always get in for free. (Markus, 11–12)

To Master Groggy, from Afar

Priests make a brothel’s flushest clients;
Among Buddhas, Zuigu is foremost.
But I get a chilly reception at all the teahouses;
My bills have piled into mountains.

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Pleasures and reprimands jointly accumulate;

Relatives hold solemn family council to debate my case.
But I head straight for the brothels, make the long nights fly by –
Even by breakfast, I’m still not home.
The day I’m disowned, whenever that may be,
I’ll make my way to the East.
Just as I reached the last word in looniness
I happened to make the acquaintance of Master Groggy. (Markus, 26)

Dōmyaku Sensei was a low-ranking samurai from the Hatakenaka family,

which served the Shōgoin temple residence in the imperial palace in Kyoto.
The Hatakenaka were sangoku-san (Mr. Three Koku) – an ironic, derisive
nickname for low-class retainers with minuscule stipends. In the first kyōshi,
“Kyoto Minor Retainer,” Dōmyaku mocks members of his own class for being
arrogant while hiding their extreme poverty. In the next kyōshi, “To Master
Groggy, from Afar,” published in 1790 under the title “Elegant Compositions
by Two Masters” (Nitaika fūga), Dōmyaku describes his social upbringing and
the life of dissipation that caused him to be disowned. These examples show a
self-mockery that implicates the writer in the very social ills he is critiquing.

Kyōka
Waka poets wrote kyōka, a parodic and popular form of the thirty-one-
syllable waka, as a form of amusement or diversion, in much the same way
that Japanese kanshi poets composed kyōshi. Kyōka relied heavily on com-
plex and witty wordplay and incorporated socially diverse content that broke
the bounds of classical waka. Such kyōka was composed from the medieval
period, but it was not until the early Edo period that it was recognized as a
new art form, like that of haikai, and was practiced by a wide social spectrum.
This new genre of kyōka first emerged in Kyoto and then spread to Osaka,
where it became extremely popular and was known as Naniwa (Osaka)
kyōka. This early wave of kyōka reached Nagoya, Hiroshima, and other
locales, but not the city of Edo.
However, in the late eighteenth century, kyōka suddenly blossomed in
Edo, alongside satiric kyōshi and senryū, led by young bakufu retainer poets.
In the 1770s a coterie of samurai in Edo – Yomo no Akara (1749–1823), Akera
Kankō (1740–1800), Karagoromo Kisshū (1743–1802), and others – gathered for
kyōka meetings and contests, and in the Tenmei era (1781–9) they began
publishing their kyōka. The first and largest of these Edo kyōka anthologies
was Manzai kyōka shū (Wild Poems of Ten Thousand Generations, 1783,

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edited by Akara), which spurred what literary historians have called the
Tenmei “kyōka boom” in Edo. This movement flourished in the atmosphere
created by the bakufu administration of Senior Councilor Tanuma Okitsugu
(r. 1772–86), whose pro-commerce policies generated a sense of liberation
among Edo samurai and contributed to the flowering of new Edo genres
such as senryū, sharebon, and kibyōshi.
Yomo no Akara (1749–1823), the kyōka pen-name of Ōta Nanpo, a noted
writer of kyōshi, sharebon, and kibyōshi, published his noted collection of kyōshi
and kyōbun, Neboke sensei bunshū (Master Groggy’s Literary Collection) in 1767.
His strongest work, however, was in the genre of kyōka. In the early 1780s,
Karagoromo Kisshū, a more conservative poet, stressed allusive variation and
wordplay, whereas Akara (and his followers) saw kyōka as a means of describing
everyday emotions, particularly those of the Edo townspeople. In 1783, when
Akara edited Manzai kyōka shū (Wild Poems of Ten Thousand Generations), the
most influential of the Tenmei kyōka anthologies, he attracted his own follow-
ing. As a Tokugawa houseman (gokenin) in the Edo bakufu, Akara was careful
not to write anything that would endanger his relatively high position as a
samurai, and did not express subversive or critical thoughts in the way that
someone like Hiraga Gennai did. In response to the Kansei Reforms (1787–1805),
initiated by Matsudaira Sadanobu, which curtailed many of the liberties of the
Tanuma era, Ōta Nanpo (Akara) was forced, at least temporarily, to leave the
literary world and concentrate on his responsibilities as a bakufu official.
The following kyōka by Akara is from Manzai kyōka shū, which adopts the
topical structure of imperial waka anthologies (the title echoes that of the Senzai
waka shū, the seventh imperial waka anthology). This kyōka appears in the
second volume of spring, where waka about the blossoming of the cherry trees
were traditionally placed.

On the Blossoms of Yoshiwara

Yoshiwara no In Yoshiwara
yomise o haru no the women are displaying their wares
yūgure wa as evening falls –
iriai no kane ni blossoms glowing amidst the echoes
hana ya sakuran of the vesper bells.
The first two lines describe the women of the pleasure quarters, using con-
temporary vernacular, while the bottom half is purely classical in diction and
grammar, borrowing from the waka tradition and transforming the brothel
into an elegant, seasonal landscape. As in many kyōka, the humorous effects
hinge on placing something contemporary, vulgar, or quotidian in an elegant,

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neoclassical context. Typically, a kyōka poet treated a classical topic using

popular language or, conversely, approached a contemporary topic (such as
the theater or the licensed quarters) using classical diction or a classical
perspective. One fundamental form of kyōka is the honkadori, or allusive
variation on a specific “foundation poem” (honka), in which the kyōka trans-
forms the meaning of a well-known classical poem, thereby bringing the
foundation text into the vulgar or popular world. Wordplay also is a central
element of kyōka, particularly puns (kakekotoba) and word associations (engo).
Both rhetorical devices make kyōka very difficult to translate.
The following example, from the winter volume of Manzai kyōka shū, is
written by Akera Kankō (1740–1800), a low-ranking bakufu retainer and one
of the leading kyōka poets during the Tenmei boom.

On the Year’s End

Shakkin mo Under a ragged loincloth
ima wa tsutsumu ni some things can’t be hid –
tsutsumarezu my debts, too,
yaburekabure no protrude through
fundoshi no kure the frayed end of the year.
(Sato/Watson, 361)

The kyōka takes up a late winter topic that would never be found in classical
waka: the Edo period custom of having to pay off all debts by the end of the
year. The humor comes from the combination of phonic repetition (tsu-
tsumu/tsutsumarezu, yabukekabure) and the embarrassing appearance of debt,
likened to genitals protruding from a frayed loin cloth.
Kyōka often required knowledge of the classical poetic tradition, which
made it difficult for popular audiences to assimilate. The more sophisticated
kyōka were published in kyōka ehon (picture books with kyōka), elaborately
illustrated books on topics ranging from insects to sea shells. At the same time,
kyōka gradually became an integral part of popular culture. For example,
Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidō hizakurige (Travels on the Eastern Seaboard, 1802–
9), one of the most popular comic novellas (kokkeibon) of the early nineteenth
century, includes numerous kyōka, many of which rely on homophonic play
for their humor and serve as a kind of commoner’s waka.

Senryū
The seventeen-syllable senryū became popular in the 1750s. The senryū has
the same 5–7–5 syllabic structure as the hokku, the opening verse of haikai

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linked poetry, but unlike the hokku (renamed “haiku” in the modern period),
which requires a seasonal word (kigo) and focuses primarily on the natural
world, the senryū uses humor, satire, and wit to comment on contemporary
society and the human condition. Historically, senryū derived from the
practice of maeku-zuke (verse capping), which can be traced back to linked
verse in the medieval period. In verse capping, the judge (tenja) presents an
initial or “prior” verse (maeku) to which the participants respond with an
“added” verse (tsukeku). These joined verses are then judged and assigned a
score. As a rule, the initial verse is fourteen syllables while the joined verse is
seventeen syllables.
The term senryū comes from the name of Karai Senryū (1718–90), a town
official in the Asakusa district of Edo. He was a noted judge of verse capping
and was known for his judgments on manku awase (ten-thousand-verse
contests) in which a judge presented an initial verse for which the participants
submitted joined verses. Prizes were awarded to those whose joined verses
received high marks. In 1765 Senryū’s disciple published Haifū yanagidaru
(Willow Barrel, commonly called Yanagidaru), a collection of 756 prize-win-
ning verses from earlier manku awase (dating from 1757 to 1765). This was one
of the first such collections to omit the initial verse (maeku) and treat the
added verse (tsukeku) as an independent poem. In this way, a new genre was
born, named after Senryū himself. Willow Barrel proved to be so popular that
it was repeatedly expanded, and by the time it ceased publication, in 1838, it
numbered 167 volumes.
Senryū covered a broad range of topics of interest to contemporary
audiences, particularly in Edo, which had become a major metropolis by
the mid eighteenth century. Topics included domestic life, various occupa-
tions (from doctor to laundryman to thief), recent incidents, noted historical
events, literary figures, to name just a few. Senryū addressed topics (such as
sex) that Edo period haikai from the Teimon school onward had avoided, and
gave them a humorous twist. Suetsumuhana (Safflower, 1776–1801), an under-
ground bestseller, is a senryū collection devoted exclusively to erotica.
The fundamental differences between modern haiku and senryū can be
traced to their historical origins. Haiku was originally the opening verse
(hokku) of a linked-verse sequence, and senryū was an offshoot of the
added verse (tsukeku). Consequently, senryū does not require a seasonal
word (kigo), which marks the occasion of the hokku’s composition and
connects it to nature and to the larger poetic tradition. Unlike the hokku,
senryū does not require a cutting word (kireji), which usually splits the verse
into two syntactic parts. The haiku often ends in a noun or a sentence-ending

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declension, which gives a sense of closure, whereas the senryū often closes
with the continuative verb form (renyōkei), suggesting further action.
Generally, the senryū abbreviates a key word or the main topic, creating a
sense of surprise when the reader realizes what has been omitted.
The humor of senryū frequently stems from deflating objects or persons of
high status, authority, or elegance. Senryū parodies figures and incidents in
classical literature as well as famous poetic phrases and well-known aphor-
isms (kotowaza), and examines the world with a sharp and satirical eye.
Ohanage o All he does at work:
kazoete iru ga count the number of hairs
tsutome nari in his lord’s nostrils. (Ueda, 56)
This senryū (from Yanagidaru, vol. 24) describes a town official whose main
occupation is fawning on his superior. The lives of those on the lowest rungs
of society are also described in senryū (such as this one from Yanagidaru shūi,
vol. 10), usually in a comic and satiric fashion.
Yoku shimete Off to work,
nero to ii-ii the burglar to his wife:
nusumi ni de “Lock up tight when you go to bed!”
(Sato/Watson, 364)
Kyōshi, kyōka, and senryū shared a sharp ironical and critical perspective on
contemporary society. Of the three genres, kyōshi and kyōka were initially
the purview of educated elites, while senryū enjoyed a wider social base.
The practice of composing kyōshi continued sporadically into the Meiji
period (for example, in the form of political satire), but today it is gone,
together with the composition of kyōka. About 200,000 senryū from the
middle to the end of the Tokugawa period survive, almost all of them
anonymous, in contrast to kyōka and kyōshi, which were signed and
whose authors made a name for themselves. Even Karai Senryū, the founder
of the genre, is known primarily as a judge rather than a poet. The practice of
writing senryū remains popular today, perhaps because it has few formal
restrictions and can deal with contemporary society. Many English haiku
composed outside Japan, which do not require a seasonal word, are in fact
senryū.

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 52
Picture books: from akahon to kibyōshi
and gōkan
michael emmerich

In the tenth month of 1811, three relative newcomers to Edo’s busy publishing
world issued a book titled Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō (First of All just Give It a
Read: Kojorō of Mikuni). The three men were Tsuruya Kinsuke, who had
recently opened his own publishing house after working as head clerk for the
famous publisher Tsuruya Kiemon; Santō Kyōzan, the younger brother of the
celebrated writer Santō Kyōden; and Utagawa Kunisada, a young artist whose
first triptych Tsuruya Kinsuke had issued in 1807, and who was already gaining
a reputation as the second-best print artist in Edo after his mentor Utagawa
Toyokuni. The book itself was also something fairly new: it was a gōkan
(multibooklet), the last in a series of genres combining pictures and prose
that were produced in Edo – and in Tokyo after the city’s name was changed in
1868 – from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These genres,
including akahon (red books), kurohon/aohon (black books, green books),
kibyōshi (yellow covers), and gōkan, together fall under the general heading
of kusa-zōshi (grass books). Each genre derives its name from its physical
characteristics: akahon had red covers; kurohon had black covers; aohon had
light green covers (“aohon” is sometimes mistranslated as “blue books” out of
deference to the crayon-box equation of ao with blue); kibyōshi had yellow
covers; and gōkan (literally “combined booklets”) were made by binding
together multiple five-leaf booklets – five leaves being the length of a single
booklet in earlier genres of kusa-zōshi. Works in these genres were also
commonly referred to during the Edo period as e-zōshi (picture books) or haishi
(unofficial histories); sometimes, confusingly, the words “akahon” and
“aohon” were also used to refer to kusa-zōshi as a category, or to particular
books that would not today be considered akahon or aohon. During the Meiji
period gōkan were sometimes described as eiri yomihon (illustrated reading
books), as if they were a subcategory of yomihon (reading books). Recently
Adam Kern has translated “kusa-zōshi,” vividly if controversially, as “comic
books.”

510
Figure 1. From Santō Kyōzan’s Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō (1811), with pictures by Utagawa Kunisada. Readers of illustrated fiction engaged in a
discussion of “red books.” Waseda University Library, Special Collections.
 michael emmerich

Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō opens with a preface by Kyōzan and a discussion
among fictional readers of gōkan modeled on the yakusha hyōbanki (actor
critique) – an annual publication that used a conversational format to eval-
uate kabuki actors’ performances during the preceding theatrical year.
Together these opening sections offer a snapshot of the world of the gōkan
and of the history of kusa-zōshi more broadly as they appeared at the time,
soon after the gōkan came into being. First, Kyōzan’s preface:
Author’s Preface
Many of the so-called Four Great Literary Marvels were once-in-a-lifetime
books, and they became so marvelous as a matter of course because their
authors devoted such a long time to their revision. Even the great plays of
Chikamatsu and Takeda Izumo and the masterful collections of
Hachimonjiya Jishō and Ejima Kiseki were written at a pace of only two or
three a year. There are so many publishers of these akahon and so on that we
have today, and such a dearth of writers, that nowadays even a hack like me
puts out more than ten works each year. When you produce a lot, you run
out of seeds for stories. Run out of seeds, and you run out of money – and
then you run out on your debtors, too. In weaving this work, buying time
with the bookstore’s trusty “It’ll be in day after tomorrow, I promise!” while
I toiled by lamplight, I made like a crow, digging up seeds Jishō and Kiseki
had planted, and in this manner added this title to my total of ten-or-so.1

“These akahon and so on that we have today” (ima no akahon no gotoki) refers,
not to the genre now known by that name, which had flourished during
the first half of the eighteenth century, but to the gōkan – a fact evident in the
implicit distinction Kyōzan makes between “today’s akahon” and those of the
past. Kyōzan’s invocation of the term “akahon” here is metonymic: he views
gōkan not as a type of akahon in the narrow sense but as a descendant of the
form, as the akahon’s current counterpart. This awareness of the historical
development of kusa-zōshi was ubiquitous at the time, and points to a
characteristic crucial to an accurate understanding of the category: the
absence of sharp boundaries between the genres it comprises. Thinking in
terms of separate genres is useful, but one must remember that each genre is
like a color in the kusa-zōshi rainbow: red fades into black and green, which
fade into yellow, which fades into the mix of colors on the covers of the
gōkan.

1
Santō Kyōzan (text) and Utagawa Kunisada (pictures), Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō (Edo:
Tsuruya Kinsuke, 1811), 1 omote. In the original, “run out on your debtors” is literally “tell
lies”; my translation sacrifices precision in an attempt to preserve the punning.

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Kyōzan’s preface hints at a few other traits of kusa-zōshi, particularly at the

time at which he was writing. First and most obvious is their popularity. Over
time the market for kusa-zōshi, and the number of publishers, had gradually
expanded. Indeed, by 1811, as Kyōzan observes, there were hardly enough
authors to meet demand – though efforts were certainly made to recruit new
authors: Kyōzan himself published his first gōkan in 1807, the year before
Kunisada started providing pictures for works in the genre. In 1803 nine
publishers had been producing kusa-zōshi; the number rocketed to twenty-
one by 1808 and twenty-three in 1810. That this rapid expansion coincided
with the emergence of the gōkan indicates how excited publishers were
about the genre’s future, and gives a sense of the latent potential kusa-zōshi
had acquired as literacy rose and printing technologies were refined over the
century or so since the first akahon appeared. In contrast to yomihon and
ninjōbon (sentimental fiction), which were too expensive for most individuals
to purchase and tended to be rented from kashihon’ya (commercial lending
libraries), kusa-zōshi were reasonably priced and well suited to private
acquisition – they were popular both as a form of entertainment and as an
object of consumption, even of collection. Indeed, Kyōzan’s reference to the
bookstore’s evidently familiar put-off, “It’ll be in day after tomorrow,”
conjures the image of an enthusiastic fan eager to buy some new work as
soon as possible. A kibyōshi from 1802 includes a scene showing a bookstore
mobbed by customers, one of whom responds to the clerk’s protestation that
the books haven’t yet been bound by shouting out, “We’ll bind them
ourselves, just give ’em to us as they are!” (Jippensha Ikku, Atariyashita
jihon-doiya, Edo: Murataya, 1802).
Other elements crucial to understanding kusa-zōshi emerge from
Kyōzan’s preface. His publishers paid him for his creative labor, for instance –
a custom that seems to have become commonplace only during the age of
the kibyōshi. One notes, too, that through his comparison of himself to the
playwrights Chikamatsu Monzaemon and Takeda Izumo and to the writers
Hachimonjiya Jishō and Ejima Kiseki – setting aside the “Four Great Literary
Marvels” of the Chinese tradition – and especially through his mining of
Jishō’s and Kiseki’s writings for “seeds for stories,” he situates kusa-zōshi in a
lineage of fictional production that includes both printed jōruri (puppet play)
texts and what have conventionally been known as ukiyo-zōshi (books of the
floating world). Tellingly, all four of the earlier writers Kyōzan cites were
associated not with Edo, the home of kusa-zōshi, but rather with the
Kamigata region, centered on Kyoto and Osaka. There is a sense here,
perhaps, that while Kamigata used to lead the way in the production of

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fiction, Edo has now assumed the lead; and implicit in this competitive
perspective, in turn, is knowledge that the locally inflected nature of publish-
ing did not preclude the circulation of books throughout the country. As it
happens, the copy of Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō I am quoting is from a series of
kusa-zōshi reprints published in the Owari domain, in what is now Nagoya,
and issued, tellingly, with red covers. Finally, the mere fact that Kyōzan
wrote a preface at all, as well as his description of himself “weaving this
work,” indicates that he considered himself primarily responsible for the
book, and that this view was shared by publishers and presumably also by
readers, even though he and Kunisada were both credited on its cover and
final page.
Many of these points are reinforced by the conversation that follows
Kyōzan’s preface, which literally offers a collective portrait – in the kuchie,
or “opening illustration” reproduced in figure 1 – of a readership with a good
grasp of the history of kusa-zōshi, of how gōkan were produced, and of the
pleasures they offered. The conversation begins with a comment from the
“head of the group” (tōdori):
Well then, what I would like to talk with you all about this year, as in years
previous, is a kusa-zōshi with text by Kyōzan and pictures by Kunisada. In
Kamigata, they would call it an akahon, and they would be right to do so.
Allow me to give you just a look. ○ Akahon aficionado: “Ah, yes, yes. It’s
been ages since anyone called them kurohon. In the days of Kisanji and
Harumachi people were more stylish and always called them green.
Nowadays if you mention ‘combined booklets’ even children assume you
must be talking about kusa-zōshi . . . ○ Akahon fan: “Sure, sure, I just want
to see the kuchie! C’mon, hurry up! . . . ○ Akahon expert: “Actually, kuchie
are a recent phenomenon. The reason you have kuchie in kusa-zōshi is that
they let you figure out right away which are the good guys and which are
the bad guys. They also show you the broad outlines of the plot in the rest
of the book . . . ○ Know-it-all: “Actually, the way kusa-zōshi are made is
that the author sketches the pictures in the manuscript and writes in the
text, then the artist either copies it as it is or fixes it up as he copies it. The
author is like the leading male-role actor and the artist is the female-role
actor, and the book won’t be any good unless they’re both skilled at what
they do. ○ Akahon fan: “I enjoy every one, so I buy them all, every year –
there isn’t one I haven’t seen . . . ○ Gallant: “Both authors and artists are
sons of Edo! We’re fans of ’em all!” (Santō Kyōzan, text, and Utagawa
Kunisada, pictures, Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō, Edo: Tsuruya Kinsuke, 1811).

This is a made-up conversation, of course, but Kyōzan does not appear to be

presenting it as implausible. It is the sort of talk ordinary readers of kusa-zōshi

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might have had, and it conveys a sense of how, in 1811, the category was
perceived: as a lineage of books that could be split up into subcategories but,
at the same time, were on some level just different versions of the same thing,
called by different names; as a forum for constant innovation, as the intro-
duction of kuchie (a feature pioneered in yomihon) to the gōkan indicates; as
a form of entertainment enjoyed by both adults and children; and, as the
gallant makes explicit, as a local Edo product of which Edoites could be
proud. In fact, this local pride is implicit even in the head’s initial observation
that in Kamagita people call kusa-zōshi “akahon” – the same term Kyōzan
uses in his preface, and to identify most participants in the talk. Edoites knew
that people in other cities, even in the most far-flung domains, were avid
readers of kusa-zōshi.
Now that we have, through considering a particular gōkan, acquired an
understanding of how kusa-zōshi looked to readers at the time, we can step
back and try to define the category, and the individual genres it comprises, as
they are apprehended in current scholarship.
As we have seen, the category of kusa-zōshi comprises a series of genres
of fiction that were produced in Edo, but circulated and were sometimes
reprinted in other parts of the country, from the late seventeenth to the late
nineteenth centuries. Akahon are thought to have existed by at least the first
decade of the eighteenth century; the earliest definitively dateable kurohon
is from 1744, though works in the genre were probably being published a
decade or more earlier; aohon seem to have begun appearing shortly after
kurohon. Kurohon and aohon are commonly grouped together today
because works that have survived in multiple copies often exist as both
kurohon and aohon, with covers in each color; by the 1750s, works origin-
ally issued as aohon were being sold with black covers, and at a discount
price, when they were no longer current. The kibyōshi is said to have been
invented in 1775 with the publication of Koikawa Harumachi’s Kinkin sensei
eiga no yume (Master Flashgold’s Splendiferous Dream), though publishers
had already abandoned the original light green covers of the aohon in favor
of less expensive yellow ones, since the light green gradually faded to
yellow anyway; the generic shift, in this case, was due primarily to the
freshness of Kinkin sensei eiga no yume’s content, which was sophisticated
enough that adults readers were clearly its main audience. Gōkan, by
contrast, emerged first as a new format in 1804 and only began to move
away in small steps, in terms of its content, from the kibyōshi that had
immediately preceded it. New gōkan continued to appear through the
1870s. Then, as the newspaper serial and the novel gained in popularity,

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and as movable type supplanted woodblock printing, new kusa-zōshi

ceased to appear.
While each of the four genres of kusa-zōshi has its own characteristics – it
is this that has made it possible to regard them as genres rather than simply as
different formats, and in some cases to assign works issued in exactly the
same format to different genres – all kusa-zōshi also share certain broad
similarities. As a general rule, they were published as chūhon (mid-sized
books, approximately 13 by 18 centimeters in size). They were printed from
woodblocks, most often on repulped paper, and were bound in the fukurotoji
(pouch binding) format. In order to produce a fukurotoji-bound book, sheets
of paper were printed on one side, folded in half with the printed side out,
stacked, sandwiched between flat covers, and sewn together along the edge
opposite the folds. In the case of akahon, kurohon/aohon, and kibyōshi, one
work would consist of between two and six booklets (kan) of five double-
sided leaves each; to create a gōkan, two or more sets of five leaves would be
bound together into longer fascicles (satsu), two or more of which could in
turn be identified as parts of a single chapter (hen) in a multichapter work.
The gō in “gōkan” means “to combine,” or in this case “to bind together,” and
the word “gōkan” could originally have denoted any book formed by binding
two or more volumes together – hence the akahon aficionado’s observation
in Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō that, “Nowadays if you mention ‘combined
booklets’ even children assume you must be talking about kusa-zōshi.”
Interestingly, the history of kusa-zōshi was inscribed in the very materiality
of the book, since the basic five-leaf booklet retained its importance even in
the gōkan: booklets were still numbered when they were bound together,
and pictures did not continue from the last page of one booklet to the first
page of the booklet it was bound with, even though the two pages formed a
single spread. As was conventional with premodern Japanese books, leaves
rather than pages were numbered and counted: page one was “one omote”
(obverse); page two was “one ura” (reverse); page three was “two omote”;
page four was “two ura”; and so on.
The process by which kusa-zōshi were published evolved over time. In the
case of akahon and kurohon/aohon, it seems likely that in some cases at least
the same person may have been responsible for preparing both the pictures
and the text; many are anonymous, and when a name does appear at the end
of the book it is that more often of the artist than of an author. During the
heyday of the kibyōshi, it became common for an author to take responsi-
bility for preparing the text and sketches for the pictures; an artist would then
finalize the pictures, while an amanuensis would make a clean copy of the

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text. Some talented individuals still took on two or even all three of these
roles: Santō Kyōden got his start as an artist, using the name Kitao Masanobu,
and collaborated with himself for a time even after he embarked upon his
career as an author, signing books with both names; Jippensha Ikku would
serve as author, artist, and amanuensis. Once the clean copy of the manu-
script was ready, it would be passed to a block carver, who would affix each
thin sheet of paper face-down to a woodblock and carve away all the white
space; a printer would then print the pages; others would fold and collate the
leaves, trim the pages, put the covers on, and bind the booklets. Until the
gōkan became established as a genre, title slips were affixed to the covers;
gōkan were provided with lavish full-color, sometimes even embossed cov-
ers. Judging from Atariyashita jihon-doiya (It’s a Hit! The Local Book
Wholesaler, 1802), a kibyōshi that traces the production process of a kibyōshi
from start to finish, all these tasks were performed by men, with the excep-
tion of the binding of the booklets. Kusa-zōshi authors and artists were also
essentially all male; the only exceptions I know of are two authors: Kurotobi
Shikibu, who, along with Kyōzan, was one of Santō Kyōden’s younger
siblings, and Gekkōtei Shōju, who collaborated with her husband, the artist
Katsukawa Shunkō II. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when
publishers began issuing kusa-zōshi twice a year, new works went on sale, as
a rule, around New Year, though in practice the season could start a good
deal earlier. This imbued the books, both as objects and in terms of their
content, with a festive, celebratory quality: akahon, whose red covers may
originally have implied a power to ward off sickness and other evil, are said to
have been given to children as New Year presents; kibyōshi and gōkan in
particular often ended with repetitions of the exclamation medetashi medeta-
shi, which perhaps might be rendered as “Happy day, happy day!”
Generally speaking, kusa-zōshi always combined pictures and text on the
same page, with the text appearing either at the top of the page, in some early
akahon, or in the negative space in the pictures. Gōkan occasionally included
pictorial spreads with little or no writing on the one hand, or pages com-
pletely filled with writing on the other. The main texts in all forms of kusa-
zōshi would usually be printed almost exclusively in hiragana, so that the
writing was legible even to the minimally educated; titles and the prefaces
that appeared in kibyōshi and gōkan were heavy on kanji, but they were
usually glossed with hiragana readings. Right from the start, then, kusa-zōshi
were aimed at a large and diverse audience. Though early kusa-zōshi are
sometimes described as children’s books, they contain elements likely to
appeal as much to adults as to children, or more to adults than children –

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notably material from recent theatrical productions; often the text in these
early works is so fragmentary that it seems intentionally designed to be
expanded upon, perhaps by adults looking at the books with children. By
the same token, the authors of kibyōshi and gōkan often explicitly identified
their target audience as “women and children” in prefaces and elsewhere,
though in reality these works were read by men as well as women, adults as
well as children. It has been suggested that the tendency to depict kusa-zōshi
as mere playthings for women and children grew especially pronounced
beginning in 1790, as authors reacted to governmental scrutiny during the
Kansei Reforms.2 That said, women and children probably did form an
especially important part of the audience for kusa-zōshi throughout much
of its history; this is evident in the case of gōkan, for instance, from an
abundance of depictions of women and children as readers and collectors
in fiction and prints; from the prevalence in gōkan of advertisements for
products such as women’s cosmetics and cures for bedwetting; and from
published accounts of childhood experiences with books in the genre. Meiji-
born artist Kaburagi Kiyokata, for example, had fond memories of kneeling
with one hand propped on the floor as a child, gazing down at a gōkan while
his great-aunt, beside him, explained what was happening in each picture
(etoki o shite kikaseteiru).3
Modern scholars sometimes refer to kusa-zōshi as a subset of kinsei shōsetsu
(early modern shōsetsu). This makes sense so long as one interprets
“shōsetsu” in a sufficiently vague manner as meaning something like “fic-
tion.” The aficionado of popular fiction Kimura Mokurō used the word in
more or less this way when he grouped both kusa-zōshi and yomihon
together as haishi shōsetsu (unofficial-history fictions) in his historical and
theoretical treatise Kokuji shōsetsu tsū (A Connoisseur of Fiction in the Native
Script, 1849), for instance. One needs to be very careful, however, not to fall
into the trap of thinking of kusa-zōshi as “shōsetsu” in the sense in which the
word has most often been used in modern times, as a counterpart of “novel”
– or, in the form of tanpen shōsetsu, of “short story.” This is crucial because
kusa-zōshi were not illustrated texts; on the contrary, throughout the entire
history of the category, the writing was always secondary to the pictures.
Indeed, this might even be regarded as the defining feature of kusa-zōshi. The
relationship between the writing and the pictures was nowhere clearer than
in the term with which authors referred to the text on a given page: they
2
Itasaka Noriko, “Kusazōshi no dokusha: hyōshō toshite no dokusho suru josei,” Kokugo to
kokubungaku 83, no. 5 (2006): 2–3.
3
Kaburagi Kiyokata, “Kusazōshi,” in Meiji no Tōkyō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), 41–4.

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 Picture books: from akahon to kibyōshi and gōkan

called it etoki, “the explanation of the picture.” Kaburagi explicitly states that
“Looking at the pictures was always the main thing in kusa-zōshi; the writing
was just there to explain the pictures (etoki ni suginai).” The writer and
journalist Nozaki Sabun – a one-time disciple of Meiji period author
Kanagaki Robun, whose works included gōkan – said he had been told that
since authors planned the pictures in kusa-zōshi first, the pictures dictated the
length of the text. Indeed, he suggested that the rather bizarre phrase jiiri
shōsetsu (shōsetsu with writing inserted) accurately captured the nature of the
form.4 A more palatable alternative, suggested by the pathbreaking scholar of
prints and kusa-zōshi Suzuki Jūzō, is etoki shōsetsu (picture-explaining
shōsetsu). It is telling that while the title Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojorō contains
the verb yomu in the form yondemi (give it a read), the “akahon fan” who
participates in the conversation that opens the book says, “I buy them all,
every year – there isn’t one I haven’t seen.” The verb here is miru (to look at).
Unsurprisingly, the style of the pictures in kusa-zōshi evolved considerably
over the nearly two-century-long history of the category, becoming both
more sophisticated in their design and more technically accomplished as
instances of woodblock printing. Akahon, of which only about fifty complete
or nearly complete works survive, had minimal text and featured pictures by
artists such as Okumura Masanobu, Kondō Kiyoharu, Nishimura Shigenaga,
and Hanegawa Chinchō; kurohon and aohon had more text but were still
dominated by their pictures, which were now largely provided by Torii-
school artists including Torii Kiyomasu, Torii Kiyoshige, Torii Kiyomitsu,
and Torii Kiyotsune, along with other artists such as Tomikawa Ginsetsu and
Yamamoto Yoshinobu. Pictures in these early forms of kusa-zōshi are char-
acterized by the relative thickness of their lines and a fondness for curves
most evident in the dividing lines used to separate different scenes in a single
spread, which resemble cartoon clouds, and in the roundness of characters’
bodies, most apparent in their bulging limbs. Figure 2 is a typical example
from the kurohon Fūryū ittsui otoko (A Stylish Pair of Men, 1758). Kibyōshi
feature pictures by members of the Kitao school, founded by Kitao
Shigemasa, and the Katsukawa school, as well as by artists such as
Kitagawa Utamaro; gōkan were effectively dominated by the Utagawa
school, above all by Utagawa Toyokuni and Utagawa Kunisada. The amount
of text increased dramatically in the kibyōshi and then again in the gōkan,
making it necessary to have more blank space in the compositions, which

4
Nozaki Sabun, “Kusazōshi to Meiji shoki no shinbun shōsetsu,” Waseda bungaku 261
(October 1927): 147–8, 145.

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 michael emmerich

consequently became less busy as a rule; characters’ bodies and faces also
grew leaner, recalling the prints of beauties (bijinga) that were being created
by the same artists. Landscapes, too, began to overlap with those in landscape
prints. The shift from the Torii school artists, closely associated with the
theater, to later artists active in the production of ukiyo-e prints led to a
substantial change in the pictorial character of kusa-zōshi, as a comparison of
figures 1 and 2 indicates.
One further characteristic of kusa-zōshi’s pictures beginning with later
kurohon/aohon is connected intimately with their content: the use of actors’
likenesses (yakusha nigaoe). Akahon often represented familiar story types
already in circulation during the medieval period such as “the sparrow who
had its tongue cut out” (shita-kiri suzume), but they also incorporated scenes
from the theater. Digests of plays and works otherwise inspired by the theater –
above all by the basic plots and character sets known as sekai (worlds),
which provided the framework for kabuki productions – continued to
appear during the heydays of the kurohon/aohon, the kibyōshi, and the
gōkan, sometimes with characters depicted using actor likenesses. The use
of likenesses became particularly common in gōkan after Ryūtei Tanehiko
published the first installments of Shōhonjitate (Taking the Prompt-Book as
My Model, 1815–24).
The content of kusa-zōshi shifted and expanded over the course of its
history. By the age of the kurohon/aohon, the familiar tales that formed the
core of the akahon were supplanted to a large extent by stories drawn not
only from kabuki and jōruri, but also from published fiction in other genres,
such as the books conventionally known as kana-zōshi (kana books) and so-
called early yomihon, as well as legends, tales of battles, and the life stories of
famous figures. The often fantastic, dynamic plots gave way in turn to an
entirely new type of fiction with the 1775 publication of Kinkin sensei eiga no
yume, mentioned earlier as the first kibyōshi. Unlike kurohon/aohon, which
had targeted both children and adults, kibyōshi appealed more to adults;
inspired by a genre known as sharebon (books of wit and fashion), they
exhibited a marked interest in everyday life and customs in Edo, which
they explored with a witty, often satirical touch. Figures such as Koikawa
Harumachi (an artist as well as an author), Hōseidō Kisanji, Tōrai Sanna,
Shiba Zenkō, and Santō Kyōden continued to publish increasingly bold
works, even – taking advantage of the fact that at the time kusa-zōshi were
uncensored – some that poked fun at figures in the government and their
policies. Matsudaira Sadanobu, senior councilor to the shogun, responded by
inaugurating the Kansei Reforms, demanding, among other things, that kusa-

520
Figure 2. A spread from Fūryū ittsui otoko (1758), with pictures in the Torii style. Typical is the abundance of curves, including those that divide the
scenes. Tōyō Bunko.
 michael emmerich

zōshi must bear the names of their authors, artists, and publishers; that they
refrain from depicting current events; and that the blocks be submitted to the
censors in advance for approval. Beginning in 1789, Kisanji, Harumachi, and
others were reprimanded; in 1790, Kyōden was fined, and in 1791, having
authored three sharebon that were published without being submitted for
approval, he was put in shackles under house arrest for fifty days. The chilling
effect of all this turned the tide of kibyōshi, stripping it as a genre of its wit and
satirical thrust, setting the stage for the rise of the revenge plot (katakiuchi-
mono), notably in a number of works by Nansenshō Somahito. One such
book, Katakiuchi kōkōguruma (Revenge: The Wheel of Filial Piety, 1804) was
the first to be published as a “combined booklet.” Within a decade or so the
multibooklet form became firmly established as a distinct genre, acquiring
full-color covers rather than title slips and the opening illustrations known as
kuchie, which depicted the main characters, attractively posed.
While at first gōkan plots remained focused on revenge, the range of
content soon began to expand. Tanehiko sparked a boom in works related
to kabuki with Shōhonjitate; Jippensha Ikku created a work called Kane no
waraji (Straw Sandals of Gold, 1813–35) that followed the travels of two
aficionados of “crazy poetry” (kyōka), first around Edo, then on to other
scenic and sacred spots around Japan; Kyokutei Bakin adapted the Chinese
vernacular classic Shuihuzhuan (The Water Margin) in a work called Keisei
suikoden (A Courtesan’s Water Margin, 1825–35); and Tanehiko produced
what quickly came to be regarded as the greatest gōkan ever created, Nise
Murasaki Inaka Genji (Fake Murasaki’s Bumpkin Genji, 1829–42), which was
based on the classic Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji). After a brief lull in
gōkan production prompted by the Tempō Reforms of 1841–3, which saw the
confiscation and destruction of the blocks for Nise Murasaki inaka Genji, the
genre came to be dominated by tremendously long works serialized over
decades. The most famous of these is Shiranui monogatari (The Tale of
Shiranui), which consists of no fewer than ninety chapters published between
1849 and 1885. In the late 1870s and the 1880s, publishers experimented with
gōkan printed using movable type, but after initial successes the genre faded,
and the history of kusa-zōshi dissolved into the history of their modern
reception.

522
 53
The birth of kokkeibon (comic novellas)
masahiro tanahashi

The genre known as kokkeibon (comic novellas) emerged in the aftermath of

the Kansei Reforms (1787–93). Before the reforms, the field of popular fiction
had been dominated by two genres: the dialogue-based sharebon (witty book-
lets) and the illustrated kibyōshi (yellow booklets). Where the former focused
on mocking the pretentious manners of male customers of the Edo pleasure
quarters, the latter had gradually come to offer satirical depictions of con-
temporary events, including those that showed the shogunate in a negative
light, and thus inevitably attracted the attention of the authorities. As a result,
both genres were suppressed in light of the censorship policies of the reform
administration: the kibyōshi abandoned political satire to embrace moral
didacticism, while the sharebon became more melodramatic, focusing on
the minute details of romance and human feeling (ninjō) in the interactions
between courtesans and customers.
However, just as existing forms of humor seemed to be disappearing from
popular fiction, other forms of laughter saw a gradual revival. In 1787,
Manzōtei (Morishima Chūryō, 1756–1810) had released an unusual sharebon
titled Inaka shibai (Country Theater) depicting a rural theatrical performance
by a troupe of itinerant actors in Echigo province. The work found humor in
the provincial manners of both actors and audience, and differed significantly
from the sharp wit and social satire of the 1780s. In 1802, this work was
reprinted in the larger chūhon (middle-sized) format, suggesting a new
demand for humor in the vacuum left by the reforms.
At the same time, the comic oral arts saw booming popularity, further
suggesting a demand for laughter among Edo’s commoner population. This
boom was initially sparked by Utei Enba’s (1743–1822) “storytelling meetings”
(hanashi no kai), in which amateur comic storytellers would gather to
exchange jokes (otoshi-banashi, literally stories with a comic ending, now
known as rakugo or oral comic storytelling). The first of these meetings was
held in 1786, attended by such figures as Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823) and Manzōtei,

523
 masahiro tanahashi

while the second, held in 1788, enlisted the help of the kabuki star Ichikawa
Danjūrō V (1741–1806) to enhance the humorous tone of the gathering. The
Kansei Reforms had imposed a strict regime of frugality and public moral
order on Tokugawa society, but the economy continued to deteriorate, and it
is no wonder that the populace craved humor all the more.
It was around the close of this period of reform that Jippensha Ikku
(1765–1831), freshly arrived from Osaka in 1793, appeared on the Edo literary
scene. While living in Osaka, Ikku had written a number of jōruri plays under
the pseudonym Chikamatsu Yoshichi, and once in Edo he made his debut in
popular fiction as a writer of kibyōshi under the patronage of the powerful
publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō (1750–97). Eventually Ikku tried his hand at
composing hanashibon (literally “story books” or joke books) and met with
great success as a prolific writer of popular fiction.
In 1801, Ikku left Edo for a tour of Kazusa province, sponsored by the
publisher Murataya Jirobē. Murataya had organized an otoshi-banashi club in
which Ikku had participated, collecting the comic tales presented at these
meetings for publication in the form of hanashibon and kibyōshi. Perceiving
the growing popularity of kyōka (comic waka), Murata asked Ikku to compose
a collection of kyōka based on his travel experiences, and the result was Tabi
suzuri (Portable Ink Stone, 1801), a collection of poems that Ikku had com-
posed at poetry gatherings at various spots along the way. Murataya had in
fact planned a follow-up collection of travel kyōka based on the famous sites
of the Tōkaidō highway, a route that Ikku knew well. This work, tentatively
titled Mago no utabukuro (A Horse-Driver’s Bag of Poems), had been adver-
tised in earlier Murataya publications as early as 1800, but Ikku and Murataya
seem to have come collectively to the conclusion that another anthology
containing only poetry would no longer be novel enough to sell. Instead,
they set about the more creative task of producing a kyōka kikōshū: a travel
diary interspersed with comic poetry, rife with the kind of humorous content
expected by otoshi-banashi audiences.
The viability of this plan may be attributed to the growing popularity of
inter-regional travel as a form of popular leisure, a development under-
written by the growth of inter-regional trade and the consequent develop-
ment of highways and roadside lodgings. Tōkaidō meisho zue (Illustrated
Sights of the Tōkaidō, 1797) and Kisoji meisho zue (Illustrated Sights of the
Kiso Road, 1805), both written by Akizato Ritō (?–1830), were among the first
of the immensely popular genre now known as chishi, geographical guide-
books to famous sights throughout the country. It soon became common-
place for such guidebooks to weave kyōka verses into descriptions of local

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sights, a factor that no doubt contributed to Murataya’s initial proposal of a

travel diary interspersed with kyōka.
The result of the collaboration between Ikku and Murataya was Ukiyo
dōchū hizakurige (Traveling the Floating World by Shank’s Mare, 1802), the
work that inaugurated the genre of kokkeibon. In a fashion that recalls the
use of a protagonist and companion in kyōgen comic drama, this work depicts
the mishaps and humorous encounters of a pair of Edo locals as they travel
from Edo to Kyoto on the Tōkaidō; it consists of otoshi-banashi-style narra-
tion and dialogue, intermingled with kyōka poetry about sights along the
way. The dialogue between the protagonists that carries the story resembles
the narrative technique found in sharebon, a genre in which Ikku had written
extensively. But while the sharebon provided the narrative form, Ikku drew
his humorous content from a wide variety of sources, including kyōgen plays,
classic comic stories, humorous tales gleaned from Murataya’s otoshi-banashi
gatherings, and Ikku’s own experience as a practitioner of sketch theater
(chaban).
The preface to this work describes the journey of the two protagonists,
Yajirobē (Yaji) and Kitahachi (Kita), as follows:
This work exposes the conditions of the populace, displayed for all to see. . . .
We will focus on the more amusing aspects of the journey, like the fashions
of inn girls and waitresses . . . The silly verses found throughout consist
purely of nonsense and punning.

This preface serves to emphasize the empirical conceit of the text while
imploring the reader to tolerate the more vulgar sides of its adult humor. In
both characteristics, Ikku’s work symbolized the birth of the kokkeibon as a
new genre.
The first volume of Hizakurige depicts only the first leg of the journey,
from Edo to Hakone, and it is unclear whether Ikku and his publisher
anticipated following Yaji and Kita all the way to Kyoto. However, the
work was a hit and continued to be serialized, along the way adopting the
name by which it is now known: Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare on
Tōkaidō, 8 vols., 1802–9). After the journey’s completion, Ikku followed up
with a prequel depicting the events that prompted Yaji and Kita’s trip
(“Hottan,” The Departure, 1814), a series of best-selling sequels under the
title Zoku hizakurige (Shank’s Mare Continued, 12 vols., 1810–22) depicting
journeys to Konpira, Miyajima, the Kiso road, and the Zenkōji Temple
(modern Nagano), and an unfinished second sequel called Zoku zoku hizakur-
ige (Shank’s Mare Continued Part 2, 2 vols., 1831) depicting a trip to Nikkō.

525
 masahiro tanahashi

As noted above, many of the episodes in these works were based on Ikku’s
own travels. In one episode, while traveling by boat, Yajirobē mistakes a
bamboo cylinder, the bottom of which was been cut out, for a bamboo urine
bottle – the equivalent of a chamber pot – and proceeds to relieve himself.
Predictably, the boat ends up being spattered with the man’s urine. This
scene appears in the fourth volume of Tōkaidōchū hizakurige:

boatman : Now who in the world’s gone and taken a piss? The spirit
of the boat’ll be defiled! Quick – go on – wipe it up!
kitahachi : Ah, what an imbecile!
boatman : Hey! Watch it! There’s still some leaking from the
cylinder! Throw that damn thing away!
yajirobefl : No, no. Here – it’s for you. It’ll make a fine fire-starter
[bamboo blowpipe].
kitahachi : Ah, who needs a fire-starter full of your piss? Hurry up
and wipe it up! Quit dallying, man.

This scene was adapted from an episode in Tabi suzuri wherein Ikku, desiring
something like a gourd in which to pour his alcohol while traveling through
Kyoto, had bought a bamboo cylinder. Only after he had been drinking out of
this cylinder with his companions for some time did he realize this was in fact
an old urine bottle, of the sort used by the elite during festivals. This same tale
of mishap is again reproduced in the third volume of Zoku hizakurige.
Similarly, in an episode in the fifth volume of Zoku hizakurige, Yajirobē,
posing as Ikku himself in order to sneak into a fancy gathering of famous
kyōka poets, is exposed by his ignorance in proper etiquette for eating the
dishes served to him; this is based on Ikku’s own experience at a banquet
hosted by the Nagoya-based author Kinome Dengaku (Kamiya Gōho,
fl. 1789–1830) and his fellow kyōka writers, all of whom appear in Ikku’s text.
As Hizakurige was growing in popularity, Ikku released a flurry of kokkei-
bon-style travel journals based on his trips around Edo’s countryside, includ-
ing Enoshima miyage (Souvenirs from Enoshima, 1809), Roku Amida mōde
(Pilgrimage to the Six Amidas, 1812), and Horinouchi mōde (Pilgrimage to
Horinouchi, 1816), as well as trips farther afield to Nagoya (Ikku no kikō, Ikku’s
Journey, 1815) and Ōshū (Ōshū dōchū no ki, Travels in Ōshū, 1817). At the same
time, Ikku managed to adapt his travel writing to other genres, including
epistolary writing primers (ōraimono) with Ise sangū ōrai (Correspondence for
a Visit to Ise Shrine, 1822) and longer illustrated fiction (gōkan) with Kane no
waraji (Metal Sandals, 25 vols., 1813–35).

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The success of Ikku’s Hizakurige series inspired other writers to produce

similar works such as Shin Rotei’s (aka Kantōbē and Akasukabē, ?–1816)
Naruko uri (Noisemaker Melons, 1806), Narita dōchū kogane no koma (The
Golden Pony’s Journey to Narita, 1812), and Ima Saigyō azuma no tabiji
(Saigyō’s Present-Day Tour of the East, 1813), and Ryūtei Rijō’s (?–1841)
Ōyama dōchū kurige no shiriuma (Hitching a Ride on a Mare through
Ōyama, 1814). Near the end of the Edo period, Kanagaki Robun (1829–94)
produced a number of similarly imitative works.
The other major kokkeibon author was Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822). Sanba’s
first work in the genre was a collaboration with Santō Kyōden (1761–1816) on
a kokkeibon titled Kyōgen kigo (Wild Words and Ornate Phrases, 1804),
consisting of a humorous collection of made-up advertising copy. Kyōden
had used similar techniques of humorous juxtaposition (mitate) in a series of
illustrated kokkeibon including E-kyōdai (Picture Brothers, 1794), Kimyōzui
(Bizarre Encyclopedia, 1803), Harasuji ōmuseki (Hilarious Stage Notes, 1810),
Zashikigei Chūshingura (Chūshingura Parlor Arts, 1810), and Jūroku rikan ryaku
engi (Abbreviated Origins of the Sixteen Arhats of Profit, 1817). Ikku, likewise,
produced several mitate-based works like Kojitsuke anmon (A Draft of
Nonsense Etymologies, 1804), Moji no chie (The Wisdom of Words, 1806),
and Otsuriki (Outrageous, 1810).
Kanwatei Onitake (1760–1818), a pupil of Kyōden’s and friend of Ikku’s, was
inspired by the latter to write a kokkeibon titled Kyūkanchō (The Myna Bird),
released in three volumes between 1805 and 1809; the second half of the
second volume was written by Ikku himself. Kyūkanchō was an attempt to
capture in writing the gestures and mannerisms of the otoshi-banashi perfor-
mer Sanshōtei Karaku (1777–1833) and the oral mimicry (ukiyo monomane) of
the entertainer Sakuragawa Jinkō. These efforts seem to have inspired
Shikitei Sanba to publish a kokkeibon in 1806 titled Namaei katagi
(Characters of Drunkards), consisting of twelve caricatured portraits of
different types of drunks, and written as a manuscript for Jinkō.
Coincidentally, in the same year, Jippensha Ikku produced a similar work
in Sokkyō atohiki jōgo (Improvisations of a Wino); Sanba, himself a notorious
imbiber, would go on to release a number of other works dealing with the
various quirks exhibited by drunks, including Nanakuse jōgo (Seven Habits of
Drunks, 1810) and Ippai kigen (Pleasantly Tipsy, 1813).
In 1809, after several years of relative creative inactivity, Sanba wrote a
kokkeibon for his younger brother, the publisher Ishiwatari Heihachi, with
the title Odoke-banashi ukiyo-buro (Humorous Tales of the Floating World
Bathhouse, aka Ukiyo-buro; 4 vols., 1809–13). According to Sanba’s preface, this

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 masahiro tanahashi

work was inspired by a performance given by Sanshōtei Karaku at the home

of the ukiyo-e painter Utagawa Toyokuni (1769–1825); Sanba, inspired by the
subtlety of Karaku’s storytelling, came up with the concept in consultation
with an unnamed publisher (perhaps his brother Heihachi) who was also in
attendance. Set in the public bathhouse (one of the centers of commoner
social life), Ukiyo-buro depicts the various unique mannerisms and speech
styles found among Edo’s commoner districts. Sanba’s technique of using
dialogue to depict the unique characteristics of a wide range of social types –
status groups, occupations, genders – had been perfected in earlier works like
Tatsumi fugen (Women’s Words from the Southeast, 1798), in which he had
succeeded in reviving the sharebon by shifting its focus from the licensed
quarters to the lower-class commoner communities of the Fukagawa district.
The topos of the bath, while on the one hand inspired by Karaku’s perfor-
mance, also drew on earlier works like Itō Tanboku’s (1680–1758) Sentō shinwa
(New Tales from the Bathhouse, 1754) and Santō Kyōden’s Kengū irikomi sentō
shinwa (New Tales of the Wise and Dull from the Bathhouse, 1802).
In the first volume of Ukiyo-buro, we are presented with a chronological
progression of scenes from the male bath (unisex baths had been nominally
banned in the aftermath of the Kansei Reforms) as seen in the morning, noon,
and evening, a narrative structure pioneered by Kyōden’s sharebon, Nishiki no
ura (Behind the Brocade, 1791). The second volume contains a similar progres-
sion of scenes from morning to noon but this time in the women’s bath; the
third volume depicts the women’s bath at the New Year, and the fourth depicts
the men’s bath in autumn. In contrast to the bawdy humor of Ikku’s Hizakurige
series and Sanba’s earlier “drunk” works, both of which were directed at male
readers, Ukiyo-buro attempted to address a growing female readership. A pupil
of Sanba relays the following words of advice from his master in the afterward
of Kyakusha hyōbanki (A Review of the Audience, 1811).
Don’t say dirty things just to be funny. Make people laugh without teasing
them. Don’t make a fool out of yourself for laughs. Look down on puns and
other wordplay.
Sanba generally avoided vulgarity in his humor, and this contributed to his
popularity among female readers. The second volume of Ukiyo-buro opens
with a morning scene in which two twenty-year-old women, Tai and Sami,
exchange some words regarding their freshly set hair:

tai : Oh, I see you’ve already finished making yourself up.

sami : Yes. Okushi came first thing this morning. Who did you up?

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tai : A woman named Osuji.

sami : It looks absolutely lovely.
tai : I don’t know about that. The girl that came by this morning is
not my usual hairdresser. My hair looks different –
something’s off.
sami : When it’s not the person you’re used to, even if they’re quite
skilled, things just don’t seem right. Turn that way. My, but it
is beautiful!

This reads like a perfectly ordinary, everyday conversation between two

young women. However mundane this dialogue might appear, access to
reading material was one of the very few pleasures available to women at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and Ukiyo-buro found an enthusiastic
audience.
During this time, Shikitei Sanba not only was involved with Sanshōtei
Karaku, but also, through his contact with Utei Enba, was able to socialize
with other comic performers like Asanebō Muraku (1777–1831) and kabuki
actors like Ichikawa Danjūrō V. The frontispiece to the second volume of
Ukiyo-doko (The Floating World Barber, 2 vols., 1813–14), a spiritual sequel to
Ukiyo-buro set in a barbershop, depicts the interior of the shop, the walls of
which are posted with flyers promoting the oral performers Sanshōtei
Karaku, Hayashiya Shōzō (1781–1842), Asanebō Muraku, and San’yūtei
Enshō (1768–1838) – implying that their oral arts have been woven into
Sanba’s text. Incidentally, the topos of the barbershop would be carried on
by Sanba’s successors: Ryūtei Rijō would release a third volume to Ukiyo-doko
in 1823, while Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1844) would release Aoyagi shinwa
tamakushige (Willowy Locks: New Tales of the Comb Chest), set in a
women’s hairdresser, in 1824.
Until this point, Sanba had concentrated most of his literary energies on
depicting the customs and mannerisms found throughout his beloved home-
town of Edo, but he later produced numerous kokkeibon containing material
gleaned from theatrical performances. Among these works are Kyakusha
hyōbanki, Kyōgen inaka ayatsuri (Rural Puppet Theater, 1811), Chūshingura
henchikiron (An Eccentric Interpretation of Chūshingura, 1812), Inaka shibai
chūshingura (Chūshingura on the Country Stage, 2 vols., 1813–14), Shirōto
kyōgen monkirigata (Forms for Amateur Theater, 1814), and Daisen sekai
gakuya sagashi (Behind the Scenes on the Cosmic Stage, 1817).
At the same time, Sanba’s interest was shifting toward the “character
sketches” (katagi-mono) of the eighteenth-century Kyoto publisher

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Hachimonjiya. In Shijūhachi kuse (Forty-Eight Quirks, 4 vols., 1812–18), Sanba

combined this inspiration with techniques of oral caricature (ukiyo monomane)
to produce neatly stylized character sketches, expressed as the “quirks” (kuse)
of various occupations and status groups. Similarly, Jippensha Ikku’s Yo no
naka hinpukuron (On Rags and Riches in the World, 1822), about people
whose fates are manipulated by the gods of poverty and riches, likewise
owes its inspiration to Hachiminjoya’s works. After the publication of
Shijūhachi kuse, Sanba produced a number of similar works, including
Hayagawari mune no karakuri (A Peep Show: Quick-Changes of Heart,
1826), Ningen banji uso bakkari (In the World of Men, Nothing but Lies,
1827), Hitogokoro nozoki karakuri (A Peep Show into the Heart of Man,
1828), and Kokon hyaku baka (One Hundred Fools Old and New, 1828), but
amid this increasing attention to the minutiae of daily behavior, Sanba’s
works gradually fell into repetitive patterns and declined in literary value.
Though the genre of kokkeibon was dominated by Ikku and Sanba, a few
other authors are worthy of note. One was Hana Sanjin (aka Tōri Sanjin,
1791–1858), a pupil of Santō Kyōden. A bushi who served the shogunate as an
assistant to the Edo city magistrates, he wrote popular fiction in a wide
variety of genres, from gōkan to ninjōbon (romantic novellas), while publish-
ing a number of writing primers on a par with Ikku. Among his more well-
known works are Ekiro no suzu (Station Bell, 1811) and Baka tawake awase-
kagami (Reverse Mirror for Fools and Goofs, 1815), but both follow the mold
set by Ikku and Sanba.
Ryūtei Rijō, like Sanjin, was an author of samurai stock, and was brother-
in-law to Sanba’s disciple Tamenaga Shunsui. Through the latter connection,
Rijō was in a position to carry on Sanba’s work, writing the third volume of
Ukiyo-doko, as well as a sequel to Ningen banji uso bakkari and a fourth volume
for Kyūkanchō. After the publication of Ōyama dōchū kurige no shiriuma, Rijō’s
Hanagoyomi hasshōjin (Eight Footloose Fools: A Flower Almanac, 5 vols.,
1820–49), packed with material gleaned from sketch theater (chaban), won
great acclaim, so much so that the rakugo routine known as Hanami no
adauchi (Flower-Viewing Vendetta) is based on a chaban scenario found in
the first volume of this work. With Wagōjin (Best Buddies, 3 vols., 1823–42,
with a fourth volume released by Tamenaga Shunsui in 1844), Rijō moved
away from chaban material to depict practical jokes and general mayhem in
an everyday context, but the comedy here is more over-the-top and contrived
than that of his earlier works.
Following in Rijō’s footsteps came Baitei Kinga (1821–93) with his Shichi
henjin (Seven Oddballs, 5 vols., 1857–63), a work with a very low and

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scatological sense of humor. Such was the direction kokkeibon followed as

the Edo period came to a close: inferior in quality to Sanba’s better works and
more vulgar than the ribald humor of Ikku’s fiction, this new comedic strain
was sadly characteristic of the deteriorating state of popular literature.
Kanagaki Robun carried on the fading tradition left behind by Hizakurige
with his Narita dōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare: Journey to Narita, 1856),
Ōyama dōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare: Journey to Ōyama, 1857), and Kokkei
Fuji mōde (A Humorous Pilgrimage to Fuji, 1860–1). Robun associated with
such kabuki figures as Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93) and entertainers like
San’yūtei Enchō (1839–1900), and would later rise to become the star of
popular literature in the early Meiji period. His Seiyō dōchū hizakurige
(Shank’s Mare: Journey to the West, 1870–6), in which two grandchildren
of Yajirobē and Kitahachi embark on a journey to see the London Exhibition,
marks the historical end of kokkeibon, a fitting final act for the genre of
popular literature first set in motion by Tōkaidōchū hizakurige.

(Translated by Kristopher L. Reeves)

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 54
Ninjōbon and romances for women
yasushi inoue

Marriage conventions during the Edo period did not presuppose romantic
love between two willing individuals. Rather, the wife was seen foremost as a
bride – a preserver of the family (ie), a bearer of children, and a household
accountant deftly managing family finances from behind the scenes. Marriage
was an arrangement between two families; the sentiments of those to be
married were scarcely considered. As evinced by the term koi nyōbō, “a wife
married out of love,” explicit mention of the word “love” (koi) implies that
romantic marriages were the exception. The sort of romantic relationships
depicted in literature from the Edo period – moving tales of love and life
sacrificed to familial pressure or social constraints, of secret liaisons and
lovers’ suicides in adamant defiance of these constraints, or of fictional
romantic spaces set within the pleasure quarters – were largely dramatized
performances of love.
Regarding the last variety of romantic tales, namely, those staged within
the pleasure quarters, it was Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), in the Kansai region,
who was the first to create this world in his writings. Later, from the mid
eighteenth until well into the nineteenth century, the Edo region, having
achieved its own cultural flowering, produced a genre of literature known as
sharebon. The term share refers to the desirable, refreshingly frank and
unpretentious dress, hairstyles, diction, and bearing of those frequenting
the pleasure quarters. Sharebon, therefore, is a genre of literature in which
the outward appearances of these figures are minutely described in order to
serve as a guide to dramatic performances of love. At the same time, share
also carries humorous connotations. Descriptions of male protagonists
whose efforts at romantic performance go haplessly awry, meant to instruct
by means of admonition, also serve to regale their readers with laughter. Not
only did these sharebon gather popularity as advertisements for the pleasure
quarters, the appearance of authors from the samurai class alarmed the Edo
bakufu, whose policies were at least ostensibly based on pristine military rule.

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Sharebon were officially banned during the Kansei and Kyōwa eras
(1789–1804), and writers were forced to substitute tales of the pleasure
quarters with other less provocative material. This transformation ushered
in a new genre of literature known as ninjōbon, or romantic novellas.
The first genre in the long history of Japanese literature to be published
commercially for a readership consisting primarily of commoner women,
ninjōbon became immensely popular. Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1844) stands
at the center of this genre with such representative works as Shunshoku
umegoyomi (Plum Calendar of Spring Colors, 1832–3), Shunshoku tatsumi no
sono (Spring-Color Southeast Garden, 1833–5), and Harutsuge dori (Spring-
Harrowing Bird, 1836–7). The plum in Plum Calendar of Spring Colors signifies
the arrival of spring, a sign of blissful love, while “plum calendar” is synon-
ymous with days spent in the company of one’s lover. Plot-wise, the ninjōbon
inevitably end on a happy note. Anticipation grows as we become anxious to
see the protagonist hold hands with and, eventually, to wholeheartedly
embrace his lover. Readers are inspired not only to sympathize with the
heroine but to become wholly enraptured with the lover. Tears of pity for the
heroine’s plight are assuaged by the final reassurance that, so long as one
leads an upright life, happiness is sure to be close at hand.

master : “Why are you crying, Yonehachi?”

yonehachi : “It’s just . . .”
master : “It’s just what?”
yonehachi : “Why, oh why have you fallen into such a pitiable
state?” she said as she pulled herself close by his
side, weeping all the while.
master : Gazing at her, the man took her hand in his; “Please
forgive me.”
yonehachi : “Why are you apologizing?”
master : “Because I’ve made you feel such sadness on account
of me.”
yonehachi : “Never mind that. Do you harbour such deep concern
for me?”
master : “Poor girl,” he said as he embraced her.
yonehachi : Yonehachi, with an air of innocence, placed herself
before the sick man’s knees and, looking up at his
face, responded; “I’m so happy to . . . Why don’t
you –”
master : “Why don’t I what?”

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 yasushi inoue

yonehachi : “I want to stay here with you forever.”

master : Hearing this, the man sat starring at her intently,
suddenly enamoured by her beauty. Pressing her
tightly to his body, he exclaimed; “Ah, but I’m
starting to feel excited!”
yonehachi : “Oh! That tickles!”
master : “Come now. Forgive me for that, too.” With that the
two fell to the floor.

At just this moment a Kanzeon bell tolled the hour of the snake [around 10:00
p.m., signaling the end of the courtesans’ working day].
This is the first love scene in Shunshoku umegoyomi. The character here
referred to simply as the “Master” is Tanjirō, a man forced to conceal himself
in a dilapidated old house. A gallant of eighteen or nineteen, burdened with a
financial debt he does not recall incurring, this young man lives his life like a
fugitive. The adopted son of the owner of a certain pleasure house located
within the Yoshihara pleasure quarters, he was once in persistent pursuit of
Yonehachi, a courtesan working at that very house. In the above scene,
Yonehachi bemoans the horrible anxiety that Tanjirō’s disappearance has
put her through, as well as the trouble she went to in finding him. Once
reunited with him, she not only exerts herself to look after him, but also
procures ample sums of cash to overcome his immediate hardships. Having
bashfully accepted her donation, Tanjirō asks whether she might not tarry a
little longer. She begins to comb his hair, which has become dishevelled on
account of his illness. Unexpectedly, she begins shedding tears at their tragic
plight.
In the real world, practical interests generally prevail over matters of love.
These romantic stories, while pointing at such dangers, satisfy the reader by
describing a world in which love is not subjugated to such practical interests.
The misfortunes that befall Tanjirō and Yonehachi prepare the reader for a
more striking representation of their love. Their conversation, for all its
passionate depth, never devolves into the explicitly sexual. The woman
kneels in front of the man, only hinting at what she hopes will transpire.
Hesitating to voice her sexual desires outright, she cuts herself short with a
suggestive “I’m so happy to . . . Why don’t you –”. Unable to perceive her
invitation, the man naively echoes her words with “Why don’t I what?”
bringing an unexpected degree of humour to the scene. At this moment,
the woman once more hints at her desire with “I want to stay here with you
forever,” whereupon their eyes meet – her intentions at last understood. No

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doubt the woman had much to say upon reuniting with Tanjirō, and yet the
fullness of her heartrending love for him is conveyed ultimately in one
emotionally condensed, unspoken plea. Their relationship, in which a single
meeting of the eyes reveals such deep emotion, is the pinnacle of sophistica-
tion (iki) and eroticism. Avoiding explicitly sexual statements was the rule
with ninjōbon. Though necessary in order to avoid censorship, these gestures
that appealed to the reader’s imagination accounted for the real charm of
such tales.
If one wished to read the short episodes of these stories, the primary option
was to rent a copy of the book. The book lending services of the time were
different from modern libraries in that the books were carried upon the
shoulders of ambulatory lenders who brought them directly to the custo-
mers. Book lenders not only acted as physical distributors of books, but,
closely following the new tastes of their readers, also functioned as gatherers
of information that worked its way back to the author. Publishing a long
series of shorter stories brought in more profit than one lengthy volume. As a
result, it became the fashion of writers in this serialized genre to conclude
each story with an enticing mystery.
Women began entering the workforce, albeit in auxiliary roles, around the
nineteenth century, implying a higher rate of literacy. Furthermore, as may
be gathered from the growing popularity of kabuki, a new tendency prevailed
whereby city women, endowed now with a surplus of both time and money,
participated more actively in the various modes of public entertainment in
these cities. Tamenaga Shunsui’s bookshop, which included a book lending
service, was established relatively late, but having perceived this wider
female readership, Shunsui was able to outdo his competitors, thereby
heralding a new literary genre.
Shunsui was different from a modern author. He inherited the professional
name “Nansenshō Somahito II,” an example of a professional name belong-
ing to certain writers of popular fiction (gesakusha) during the Edo period.
Such professional names for authors of popular fiction were the equivalent of
brand names, the exploitation of which insured quick success. Until his
bookshop was destroyed by fire, Shunsui oversaw a number of apprentice
authors. The name “Somahito II” came to represent a workshop specializing
in the production of ninjōbon. The relationship between Shunsui and his
apprentice authors was similar to that between modern-day comic book
artists and their assistants. Shunsui had simply to compile the drafts sub-
mitted by his assistants. When, near the beginning of the Tenpō era (1830–2),
he lost his bookshop to fire and thereby lost a large number of his apprentices,

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he had no choice but to begin creating literary works on his own. Such were
the circumstances behind the commencement of his Plum-Calendar series.
Only after he was deprived of his capacities as a publisher did Shunsui assume
the role of something close to a modern-day author. The success of this first
series may be attributed to his background as a seasoned compiler of popular
fiction. His technique of focusing narrative around dialogues that carried the
plot briskly along made his stories accessible even to those women whose
level of literacy was relatively low.
Reading Shunsui’s ninjōbon, we gain an understanding of just how differ-
ent the concept of romance in Edo was in comparison to our own modern
one. Consider the next scene in Shunsui’s Plum-Calendar: after a dizzying
outburst of passion making up for a lengthy hiatus, the Master Tanjirō brings
up the topic of his fiancée, Ochō, who is still a girl. While Tanjirō was in
hiding, running from the debt he had no recollection of incurring, the head
clerk of his beloved pleasure house managed to take over the business, and is
forcefully pursuing Ochō with less than noble intentions. Tanjirō, upon
hearing this news from Yonehachi, lets out a sigh for Ochō, eliciting
Yonehachi’s jealousy.

tanjirofl : “You see, she [Ochō] and I were raised together like that
since childhood. Such a pitiful girl . . .” he said in a
slightly dejected tone.
yonehachi : “Naturally. Childhood companions are especially dear.
It’s only natural for you to feel this way,” she said,
visibly irritated.
tanjirofl : “Come now. I never said she was cute. It’s just that, well,
she’s pitiable.”
yonehachi : “For that very reason, I’m not saying it’s unreasonable,”
she responded, lifting the corner of her eye in an
adorable display of jealousy.

Yonehachi lashes out because Ochō, unlike herself, is in the privileged

position of having been granted permission to marry Tanjirō. But that is not
the only reason for her ire. For a woman, going beyond the initial courtesies
of a relationship meant ascending to a more advanced stage of romance,
which, though a source of joy, was simultaneously the cause of much
anxiety, as she worried about the possibility of losing her hard-won love.
Oblivious to her feelings, Tanjirō fills Yonehachi with anxiety by telling her of
his deep sympathy for Ochō. In response to her complaints, Tanjirō neither

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apologizes nor offers any resistance. Instead, in a gesture of complete indif-

ference, he bids her to do as she pleases. Yonehachi, upon hearing this, regrets
her forwardness.

yonehachi : “In that case . . . I was the one at fault. Please

forgive me.”
fl
tanjiro : “Whatever you like.”
yonehachi : Hearing these words and seeing this man, who had up
until now been so very fond of her, thus irritated,
Yonehachi began to wonder if he would lose his
feeling for her altogether, whereupon she began to
weep desperately; “Please. I was at fault – it was me.
Please forgive me. I beg you to put away this anger.”

Realizing her feverish attack upon Tanjirō could result in losing the very man
she desires, Yonehachi turns suddenly from aggressor to weeping supplicant.
It is Tanjirō’s feigning of anger that affects such a transformation.
Tanjirō let out a quick chuckle: “Since you put it that way, I’ll forgive you –
but on one condition. It’s surely quite late by now. When you get back to
your quarters, you mustn’t worry about me. Entertain your clients as best
you can!” Yonehachi was overjoyed at these kind words. The smallest hint of
discontent drove them to heartfelt sadness, while even the slightest tender
remark made them fall in love all over again – such was their love for each
other.

yonehachi : “My young patron, saying such kind words only makes
it harder for me to leave you. From now on, no
matter what happens, I beg you: do not turn your
heart from me.”

This gift of words, delivered by Tanjirō at just the right moment, brings a
glimmer of hope to Yonehachi’s eye. As one whose business revolves around
performances of love, any real romantic attachment to Tanjirō could prove
detrimental to Yonehachi’s career. Tanjirō, appreciating her situation, seems
to say, “You’ve nothing to worry about on my end; it’s you who seems to be
so worked up.” Tanjirō rightly perceives her act of jealousy for what it is –
nothing more than an aggressive petition for proof of his love – for which
reason he feigns anger toward her. Romantic performances formed an
essential facet of any courtesan’s repertoire, so long as she wished to procure

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money from her large male clientele. Shunsui succeeded in having his male
characters participate in this same sort of performance, while transporting the
setting to locations outside the pleasure quarters.
The attraction of ninjōbon lies primarily in the conversations between
lovers. Yonehachi’s character matures and develops as a result of suffering at
the hands of Tanjirō’s manipulative words. The dialogic interplay occurs
somewhere beneath the surface, somewhere beyond words, in which space
characters attempt to subtly plumb the depths of their interlocutor’s heart.
Moreover, this mutually provocative attitude plays a vital role in the eventual
reconciliation and harmony among a bevy of woman eager to win the hand
of their Adonis.
This kind of verbal interaction became synonymous with a particular
aesthetic sense, complete with ethical connotations, known as iki (sophistica-
tion, stylishness). Historically, the term ikisuji (the path of sophistication) was
used in relation to the demimonde or romantic affairs, while the related term
ikigoto (sophisticated matters) referred generally to romantic encounters.
Furthermore, the word iki was originally written with a homophonous
combination of two Chinese characters meaning vigorous. This in turn
came to be associated with the ebullient spirit and unfailingly dignified
sense of pride (ikiji) that permeated the Edo pleasure quarters, especially
the unlicensed Fukagawa district. More specifically, iki came to be associated
with the dress and behavior of the Fukagawa courtesans, with the various
geometric patterns and soberly elegant brown and dark-gray color schemes
found on their clothing, and with their sophisticated, stylish appearance and
mannerisms.

(Translated by Kristopher L. Reeves)

538
 55
Development of the late yomihon: Santō
Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin
y ō j i ō t a k a

Among the various materials published and read as entertainment in the

latter half of the early modern period, roughly from 1750 to 1850, the genre
known as the yomihon (reading book) most closely approaches the modern
novel. Some eight hundred examples are known to have existed, comprising
two broad categories: “early yomihon,” which first came into existence
around 1750, after the heyday of the ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating
world), and typically consisted of collections of short fiction centered on
strange incidents; and “late yomihon,” which appeared in the 1790s and
consisted largely of longer historical fiction. Two authors can be singled
out as representative of each category insofar as they pioneered the arche-
typical form of each: Tsuga Teishō and Ueda Akinari for early yomihon;
Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin (aka Takizawa Bakin) for late yomihon. In
the pages that follow, I will trace the formation and development of the late
yomihon as a fictional form, focusing on Kyōden’s and Bakin’s innovations
and the relationship between the two authors.
First, it will be helpful to survey the emergence of the late yomihon,
drawing on Yokoyama Kuniharu’s now classic study Yomihon no kenkyū:
Edo to Kamigata (Studies of the Yomihon: Edo and Kamigata, 1974).
According to Yokoyama, late yomihon can be classified into four types:
haishi-mono (unofficial histories), chūhon-mono (middle-sized books), ehon-
mono (illustrated books), and zue-mono (pictorial books). Haishi-mono exhib-
ited an awareness of the Chinese fictional genre whose name was written
with the same graphs (baishi); they were based in history but had a strong
fictional thrust, and were published in the hanshi-bon format (approximately
24 by 17 cm). Chūhon-mono were written in a somewhat simpler style than
haishi-mono; their content resembled that of kusa-zōshi (grass books), and
they were published in the same chūhon (mid-sized book) format (approxi-
mately 19 by 13 cm). Ehon-mono were generally based on famous incidents of

539
 yofl ji ofl taka

the early modern period (the Akō vendetta for example), or on relatively
recent history (e.g. life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi); based on purportedly true
works called jitsuroku (true accounts) or kakihon (manuscript books) that
circulated in manuscript, they were repackaged as fiction and provided with
numerous illustrations. Works of this type were issued in the hanshibon
format; as a rule the artist was identified but the author was not. Zue-mono
had basically the same format as ehon-mono, but reached further back in
history for their material (drawing on the Genpei War, for instance) and were
distinguished by their inclusion of the author’s name. They were published as
ōhon (large books, approximately 27 by 19 cm).
Early in the yomihon’s history, the genre was dominated by ehon-mono
from Kamigata, a representative example of which is the Osaka edition of Ehon
taikōki (Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: An Illustrated Book, 1797–1802),
written by Takeuchi Kakusai (1770–1826) and illustrated by Okada Gyokuzan
(d. c. 1812).1 Ehon-mono drew for the most part either on military chronicles or
on jitsuroku derived from them, preserving the broad outlines of the history
they recounted while giving it the form of a long, unified work of fiction, and
taking care not to come in conflict with a law prohibiting the publication of
materials that dealt recklessly with family lineages and ancestors other than
one’s own.2 For a time, ehon-mono such as Ehon sangoku yōfuden (The
Enchantress of the Three Kingdoms: An Illustrated Book, 1803–5), which was
written by Takai Ranzan and illustrated by Teisai Hokuba, were the most
prominent form of yomihon both in Kamigata and in Edo.
The haishi-mono (unofficial histories) style emerged in Edo in the wake of
the Kansei Reforms (1787–93), carried out under the direction of Matsudaira
Sadanobu. After Santō Kyōden’s attention-getting punishment for three of his
sharebon (books of wit and fashion), some early yomihon authors active in Edo
incorporated discussions of the reforms in their work.3 This trend proved short-
lived, however. Soon, the need for pleasure reading more wholesome than

1
Ehon-mono incorporated elements of meisho-zue (illustrated gazetteers), which were
already meeting with success. Akisato Ritō, who pioneered meisho-zue, tried to carve
out a niche for himself by issuing his works in the ōhon format and including zue in their
titles, even as he contributed to the popularity of ehon-mono. Since there is no essential
difference between these two types of yomihon, from here on I will include zue-mono
within ehon-mono.
2
The publishers’ guilds in all three cities adhered rigorously to the law after it was issued as
a machibure (municipal decree) in each location: in Edo in the eleventh month of Kyōho 7
(1722) and in Osaka and Kyoto in the third and fourth months of the following year. Ehon
taikōki was banned in the first year of the Bunka period (1804) for infringing the law.
3
One example is Kogarashi zōshi (Tales from the Withering Wind, 1792) with text by
Shinrashi (aka Morishima Chūryō) and illustrations by Kitao Masayoshi.

540
 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin

sharebon brought new prominence to the chūhon form, which catered to

broader tastes but had previously occupied a peripheral place in the genre.
Haishi-mono yomihon inherited important characteristics from chūhon-mono
while drawing more explicitly on the kanzen chōaku (reward the virtuous and
punish the wicked) paradigm basic to most early modern works of prose fiction
(sōshi) and testing out various new approaches to make the form more
obviously fictional and creative than the Kamigata ehon-mono.
The first haishi-mono (unofficial history) yomihon was Santō Kyōden’s
Chūshin suikoden (The Loyal Retainer’s Water Margin, 1799–1801), illustrated
by Kitao Shigemasa. In this work, Kyōden fused Kanadehon chūshingura (The
Treasury of Loyal Retainers, first performed in 1748), the most celebrated play
of the early modern jōruri theater, with the major Ming dynasty vernacular
novel Shuihuzhuan (The Water Margin, J. Suikoden), an understanding of which
he acquired through two editions published in Japan: one of the vernacular
Chinese text, printed with reading marks, and one translation (tsūzokubon) into
mixed kanji and katakana Japanese prose. The two sources have been woven
together with great care and attention to detail, particularly in the first part, but
the chief interest of the final product lies in the prose, which blends the
characteristic jōruri style with the particular variety of translationese that
results from the rendering of Chinese into Japanese. Given the derivative
nature of the plot, one would be hard pressed to describe it as a stand-alone
work. In this, it remains similar to the ehon-mono.
Kyōden’s second yomihon was Asaka no numa (Asaka Marsh, 1803). Like
Chūshin suikoden it was illustrated by Shigemasa, and was the product of a
combination of two prominent works from the Chinese and Japanese tradi-
tions. This time, however, Kyōden chose to abandon the quirky prose style of
his first effort, presenting the adaptation in a flowing wabun (classical
Japanese) style. If the work has a significant failing, it is that Kyōden was
unable fully to integrate the two revenge plots at its core.
Kyōden made a significant advance in his third yomihon, Udonge mono-
gatari (The Tale of the Udumbara Flower, 1804), which was illustrated by Kita
Busei: in it, he structured the plot around a prophecy a high-ranking priest
makes in book five of Tsūzoku Kōshukuden (A Popularized Life of Xiaosu,
1770), depicting its fulfillment in the story of a young man, who after
numerous trials and tribulations finally kills the enemy he has been pursuing.
The use of the prophecy enabled Kyōden to integrate various episodes so that
none of them conflicted with any of the others, and thus to fashion a long,
unified story. I use the concept of “the yomihon framework” to refer to the
mechanism by which a person, thing, or word that crops up at the outset of a

541
 yofl ji ofl taka

yomihon creates a sense of an overarching trajectory, and have argued that

this framework is an important characteristic of haishi-mono (unofficial
histories).4 Udonge monogatari can be regarded as Kyōden’s first successful
implementation of the yomihon framework, and is particularly significant in
this regard because it became a model for subsequent yomihon in the haishi-
mono mold.
Before we can confidently place such weight on Udonge monogatari, how-
ever, we must first account for an odd fact: as it happens, Kyokutei Bakin’s
first haishi-mono yomihon, Geppyō kien (A Strange Affinity between Moon
and Ice), published at almost the same time as Kyōden’s work, in the first
month of 1805, and bearing a preface by Bakin written an entire year earlier,
in the third month of 1804, also makes use of a yomihon framework and
contains a number of passages whose content and even phrasing closely
resemble those in Udonge monogatari. Comparison of the two texts suggests
an explanation: a small number of passages in Geppyō kien appear to have
been rewritten after Bakin read Udonge monogatari in manuscript form. There
may be no conclusive evidence to support this hypothesis, but it is worth
noting that while one can clearly trace Kyōden’s progression toward the
establishment of the haishi-mono from Chūshin suikoden to Asaka no numa and
finally Udonge monogatari, Bakin had written only three chūhon-mono prior
to the publication of Geppyō kien, and none of these can be said to have
sufficiently prepared the way for the appearance of the haishi-mono style in
this work. Given that Bakin became Kyōden’s disciple in 1790 (though
Kyōden treated Bakin less as a student than as a friend), we might think of
the two men, perhaps, as “brother authors,” with Kyōden being the older and
Bakin the younger brother.
Bakin’s first chūhon-mono yomihon was Takao senjimon (The Ciphers of
Takao, 1796). In it, he wove together Tsūzoku chūgi suikoden (A Popularized
Loyal Water Margin), the jōruri play Date kurabe okuni kabuki (The Date
Rivalry and Okuni Kabuki, first performed 1779), and the jitsuroku Sendai hagi
(The Disputed Succession), clearly exploiting the same technique Kyōden
would use four years later in Chūshin suikoden. The work remained unfin-
ished, however, and its content is unremarkable. That said, its existence
indicates that, from the time Bakin placed himself under Kyōden’s tutelage,
both men shared a strong interest in producing a complete “popularized
version” (tsūzokubon) of Shuihuzhuan – indeed, they appear to have collabo-
rated on a kusa-zōshi rewriting, though only the first ten installments, done

4
Ōtaka Yōji, Kyōden to Bakin: Yomihon yōshiki no keisei (Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō, 2010).

542
 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin

by Kyōden, were ever published. Takao senjimon seems to have been a

preliminary effort on Bakin’s part, undertaken with Kyōden’s agreement, to
give shape to an idea that originated with Kyōden and would come to fruition
in Chūshin suikoden. The similarities between Udonge monogatari and Geppyō
kien, too, would seem to be a reflection of the “brotherly” relationship
between the two authors.
Like Udonge monogatari, Geppyō kien also became a model for later haishi-
mono. Interestingly, while both Kyōden and Bakin were unquestionably Edo
authors, an agreement with the work’s publisher in Edo led Geppyō kien to be
released with Bunkindō Kawachiya Tasuke, in Osaka, listed as its principal
publisher. Arrangements of this nature were not limited to haishi-mono:
yomihon of all types were produced collaboratively by publishers in the three
major cities (Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto), and were the most important product
for kashihon’ya (commercial lending libraries), which were then taking root
across the entire country. After Udonge monogatari and Geppyō kien established
the haishi-mono style, imitations of yomihon in this new mold – including
the two works that first created it – began appearing in Kamigata, where
ehon-mono had been central. More often than not, however, these Kamigata
haishi-mono resembled their Edo counterparts only superficially, and
retained a deep affinity with the ehon-mono in their reliance on jitsuroku
and other such sources. Indeed, further investigation is required to clarify the
extent to which the haishi-mono style Kyōden and Bakin pioneered was
adopted by other authors even in Edo.
The basic characteristics of the haishi-mono yomihon, in terms of content
and form, can be summed up in five points: 1. They are long works of fiction;
2. They are rooted in the ideology of kanzen chōaku; 3. They are written in a
so-called mixed Chinese and Japanese style; 4. Much attention is lavished on
their overall book design, their kuchie (opening illustrations), and their sashie
(illustrations in the main body of the text).5 Hamada Keisuke has suggested
that the material form of the haishi-mono was established around 1806 or
1807; in fact, the same can probably be said of its other elements as well.6
Kyōden wrote the core works in the haishi-mono yomihon oeuvre. These
include Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi (Book of the Dawn: The

5
Nakamura Yukihiko, “Yomihon tenkaishi no hitokoma,” Nakamura Yukihiko chojutsushū,
vol. 5 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1985); Hamada Keisuke, “Yomihon ni okeru romansu no
kōzō,” Bungaku 6, nos. 4–6 (2005).
6
See Hamada Keisuke, “Kinsei shōsetsubon no keitaiteki kansei ni tsuite,” in Kinsei
bungaku dentatsu to yōshiki ni kansuru shiken (Kyoto: Kyoto Daigaku Gakujutsu
Shuppankai, 2010). First publication January 2002.

543
 yofl ji ofl taka

Unexpurgated Story of Sakurahime, issued in the twelfth month of 1805);

Mukashigatari inazuma byōshi (The Straw Sandal, issued in the twelfth month
of 1806); and Utō Yasukata chūgiden (The Loyalty of Utō Yasukata, issued in
the twelfth month of 1806). Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi in particular is
notable for presenting the theme of a woman’s Buddhist salvation from a
perspective that surpasses an interest in good and evil, even as it draws on a
wide range of Kamigata chōhen kangebon (long preaching books, which
Nakamura Yukihiko has called chōhen Bukkyō setsuwa, “long Buddhist anec-
dotes”). In this work, Kyōden used the “life story,” which is common in
kangebon as well, as his framework: the entire tale is subsumed within the life
of a man who takes religious vows, becoming a practitioner of Pure Land
Buddhism. Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi exerted a considerable influence
on the writers around Kyōden, including Bakin, whose works from the same
period betray its impact even in their details. Bakin himself produced a few
haishi-mono in the “life story” mold, which are best represented by Shin
Kasane gedatsu monogatari (A New Tale of Kasane’s Enlightenment, 1807), also
centering on the life of a high-ranking priest.
One characteristic of Kyōden’s yomihon is their reliance on different
frameworks: there is no overlap from one work to the next. Mukashigatari
inazuma byōshi is structured as a household disturbance plot (oie-mono) like
those in kabuki and jōruri; Utō Yasukata chūgiden is based on the military
chronicle Zen taiheiki (Chronicle of the Pre-Taiheiki, earlier than 1692), and
can be described as a historical piece (shiden-mono). Bakin, in contrast,
continued to use the framework of Geppyō kien – of Udonge monogatari, that
is to say – but, drawing upon familiar stories and legends, extended its scale to
cover three or even more generations. In so doing, he brought the motif of
karmic retribution to the fore, giving rise to a legendary style of yomihon
(densetsu-mono) which he then experimented with in various ways, gradually
perfecting his technique over time.
Beginning in 1805, Bakin continued for almost a decade to write and
publish more than one yomihon a year. The most famous of these works is
Chinsetsu yumiharizuki (The Marvelous Story of the Drawn-Bow Moon),
which was illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. An extensive work in twenty-
nine volumes, published in five parts (hen) between 1807 and 1811, it recounts
the story of Minamoto no Tametomo – a hero from the military chronicle
Hōgen monogatari (The Tale of Hōgen). In it, Tametomo does not die on the
island of Izu Ōshima after being defeated in battle and then exiled, as he does
in Hōgen monogatari, but lives on and goes to the Ryūkyū Kingdom to assist in
the suppression of a rebellion. At the time he wrote the first part, which was

544
 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin

published in 1807, Bakin planned for the work to consist of twelve volumes in
two parts (zenpen, kōhen), and based its story on a brief introduction to the
Ryūkyū Kingdom in the early eighteenth-century Wakan sansai zue (Sino-
Japanese Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Three Realms), which states that
Tametomo became the Kingdom’s ruler, and on a noh play called “Ama”
(The Woman Diver) about a woman who gives her life to retrieve a jewel
stolen by the Dragon King. Thus, the idea for the book was not substantially
different from that of Kyōden’s Utō Yasukata chūgiden, which combined the
noh play “Utō” with elements from Zen taiheiki. After Bakin finished the first
part, however, he learned from Chūzan denshin roku (Records of Chūzan,
Ch. Zhongshan chuanxin lu) – a book by a Qing bureaucrat detailing the
history, geography, governance, and customs of the Ryūkyū Kingdom that
had been reissued in Japan with reading notes in 1766 – that it was
Tametomo’s son rather than Tametomo himself who had ruled the
Ryūkyū Kingdom. As a result, he completely changed his plan for
Yumiharizuki. From the second part on, Bakin began including thorough
analysis of his materials in his prefaces and afterwords, and the story came
to be driven by the “historical facts” that he had found. This represented the
birth of the long shiden-mono (historical work) – an especially important type
even within the larger category of the haishi-mono yomihon.7
Even here, though, it should be noted that Kyōden preceded Bakin in
incorporating the results of research into his works. In the second half of his
life, Kyōden devoted a good deal of energy to exploring the cultural roots of
Edo, the city where he lived and to which he owed his livelihood; the fruits of
these labors were two kōshō zuihitsu (antiquarian miscellanies) called Kinsei
kiseki kō (Thoughts on Marvels of Recent Times, 1804) and Kottōshū (Curios,
1814–15). He published the former, which centered on people and things from
Edo in the early days of the early modern period, around the time he was
developing the haishi-mono yomihon. The latter, which he wrote near the
end of his life, traced the origins of common and everyday things back in time
to the medieval period, and even beyond it to ancient times.
In all likelihood, Bakin’s interest in research, too, was a result of Kyōden’s
influence. But there was a difference in the nature of Bakin’s research: the
emphasis he placed on “history.” Koji buruisho (Ancient Matters Classified), a
manuscript in five volumes in Bakin’s own hand in which he organized
excerpts from his store of historical texts under headings, makes it clear

7
Ōtaka Yōji, “Chinsetsu yumiharizuki-ron: kōsō to kōshō,” Yomihon kenkyū 6 jō (1992); Ōtaka
Yōji, “Chinsetsu yumiharizuki no kōsō to yōkyōku,” Kinsei bungei 79 (January 2004).

545
 yofl ji ofl taka

that he had read almost all of Japan’s official histories, along with similar non-
official histories and military chronicles. According to Harimoto Shin’ichi,
Bakin probably compiled Koji buruisho in 1808.8 Around the same time, Bakin
recorded the results of an inventory of his personal library (Kyokutei zōsho
mokuroku) and purchased Hakuseki sōsho, a collection of the writings of Arai
Hakuseki, for whose profound erudition he expressed his admiration.
Around 1808, Bakin began repeatedly reiterating his thoughts about how
kanzen chōaku ought to manifest itself in the yomihon. He was vociferous in
his insistance that, when using figures who had long been familiar, one
should never turn a good person into a bad person or vice versa.
Playwrights with little regard for their audience did this kind of thing, he
explained, and it resulted in a confusion of good and bad; no such thing ever
occurred, he maintained, in fiction from China. This standpoint is profoundly
at odds with the very different style of kanzen chōaku in Kyōden’s works
from Akebono sōshi onward, which allows for people to turn their hearts
either to good or to bad. Bakin also took issue with Kyōden’s stance,
expressed in the prefaces and afterwords to his yomihon, that reading stories
could still assist people toward an understanding of the principle of kanzen
chōaku even though they were fictional, just as watching a play could.
Again in 1808, Bakin took to criticizing Kyōden at every opportunity that
presented itself as a conservative author of “sōshi,” incapable of doing any-
thing more than ape the theater; he compares himself, meanwhile, to
Chinese authors of fiction because he is able to present kanzen chōaku
correctly, through historical vehicles. Bakin’s expressions of admiration for
Arai Hakuseki’s writings, rather than Kyōden’s, as a model to be followed
clearly represented an effort to distance himself from the older writer, though
presumably it was also related to Bakin’s consciousness of his position at the
head of the Takizawa family – a samurai family, although not a high-ranking
one – and Kyōden’s status as a townsman.9 Bakin’s reworking of his idea for
Chinsetsu yumiharizuki was part and parcel of the shift taking place around this
time in his conception of himself: he was attempting to turn haishi-mono
yomihon into a new kind of fiction that superseded what were traditionally
known as “sōshi,” making them suitable for adults – in particular, mature
male readers.

8
Harimoto Shin’ichi, “Koji buruishō ni tsuite: Nansō satomi hakkenden to no kanren o
chūshin ni,” Hakkenden, Bakin kenkyū (Tokyo: Shintensha, 2010).
9
Takada Mamoru, Takizawa Bakin (Tokyo: Mineruva Shobō, 2006). See especially chap-
ter 5.

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 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin

Several years of trial and error were necessary before Bakin could com-
plete his transition to the shiden-mono (historical work) style of yomihon.
The traces of this transformation are most evident in his kōdan-mono (rumor
works), based on romantic jōruri plays, and in his early shiden-mono, in
which he seems to have felt compelled to include scenes reminiscent of the
theater even when his characters and incidents were historical. Kyōden’s
Baika hyōretsu (Plum Flower and the Cracking of Ice, 1807) inaugurated the
kōdan-mono; Bakin turned it into a genre of its own within the larger
category of haishi-mono. In his representative kōdan-mono, Sanshichi zenden
nanka no yume (The Story of Sankatsu and Hanshichi, Unexpurgated: A
Dream of Nanka, 1808), Bakin turns the male and female townspeople who
are the protagonists of the jōruri play on which the yomihon is based into
samurai who demonstrate their loyalty to their master, and has the love
suicide of the original be enacted by substitutes. Thus, in the end giri
(obligation) or kōdō (justice) are given priority over ninjō (emotion). In
early shiden-mono such as Raigō ajari kaisoden (The Story of the Priest
Raigō and the Monster Rat, 1808–9), Bakin comments explicitly on the
elements of theatricality, emphasizing that the ninjō being depicted are not,
in fact, coming from the theater but are instead consistent with common
sense among the people of the world.10
In 1813, at the other end of this transitional period, Bakin wrote a critique of
Kyōden’s yomihon Sōchōki (Record of Two Butterflies, 1813). Like his cri-
tiques of recent yomihon by Shikitei Sanba and Ryūtei Tanehiko – both
followers of Kyōden – this work, written in his own hand, was not intended
to be read by others, and thus offers much insight into Bakin’s thinking about
the yomihon. Predictably, Bakin considers the extent to which a work relies
upon the theater a significant factor in appraising its merits. A scene in which
a ruffian who has fallen in love with the female protagonist, now a courtesan,
discovers that she is actually his long-lost sister and kills himself in penance is
just the sort of thing that happens in kabuki all the time, he writes; a work of
prose fiction ought, however, to be more realistic, and as such Sōchōki could
hardly be expected to appeal to ordinary people’s emotions.
Kyōden, too, embarked upon a period of exploration in 1808. During this
time, he had difficulty balancing his materials with the themes and structures
of his works, with the result that a number of works remained unfinished,
inconveniencing his publishers. Sōchōki was not a commercial success,

10
Ōya Taeko, “Bakin no ‘ninjō’ to engeki no shūtanba,” Tōkyō Daigaku kokubungaku ronshū
2 (May 2007).

547
 yofl ji ofl taka

though it was a fresh and humane work, depicting the reconciliation of

enemies and the coming of peace to the land, which deployed its framework
adroitly and with considerable subtlety.11 Kyōden published no new yomihon
after Sōchōki; he died at the age of fifty-six on the seventh day of the ninth
month, 1816.
Bakin, meanwhile, achieved new popularity with the publication, starting
in 1814, of his shiden-mono Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Chronicle of the
Eight Dogs of the Nansō Satomi Clan, 1814–42), becoming far and away the
most celebrated yomihon author. Roughly summarized, Hakkenden is the tale
of eight dog warriors, all descended in a previous life from Fusehime, beloved
daughter of Yoshizane, the founder of the Satomi clan; each of these warriors
has his own story, but in the end they all join forces to aid the Satomi clan.
The book is too long to consider in any detail, but for the purposes of this
chapter it will be useful to look briefly at its opening, which recounts
Fusehime’s story. It begins in the Kantō region toward the end of the
Ashikaga period. In the process of conquering the province of Awa (in the
south of present-day Chiba prefecture) Satomi Yoshizane puts an evil woman
named Tamazusa to death, though he had initially promised to spare her.
Outraged, the dying Tamazusa places a curse on Yoshizane: “I will lead your
grandchildren down into the bestial path, making them dogs of the passions.”
Her fury lives on after her death, taking possession of a dog named Yatsufusa
who then saves the Satomi clan from extinction, eager to exploit a thought-
less comment Yoshizane had made to the effect that he would give the dog
his daughter’s hand in marriage if he helped them. Fusehime valiantly insists
that her father keep his word and goes off with Yatsufusa to live for two years
in a cave in Toyama, within the domain. Yatsufusa is freed from the passions
that possessed him by the merits of the Lotus Sutra, a copy of which
Fusehime brought with her; the mountain god En no Gyōja then appears
and reveals that the dog’s spirit has impregnated Fusehime, upon which she
prepares to kill Yatsufusa and herself. En no Gyōja releases the cave from a
spell that had kept others from approaching, and Tamazusa’s spirit achieves
enlightenment. Yatsufusa is killed by a bullet fired by Kanamari Daisuke,
whom Yoshizane hopes will marry Fusehime, and a second bullet strikes
Fusehime herself. Daisuke, despairing, is preparing to die when Yoshizane
appears. Returning briefly to life, Fusehime cuts open her stomach to
demonstrate that her body is pure, and eight prayer beads that have been

11
Ōtaka Yōji, “Sōchōki no meian,” Yomihon kenkyū 10 jō (November 1996); Ōtaka Yōji,
“Sōchōki no rinkaku,” Bungaku (May–June 2012).

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 Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin

hanging around her neck – each representing one of the eight Confucian
virtues – fly off into the sky. These beads will later reappear as the eight dog
warriors. Daisuke takes religious vows, having been ordered to do so by
Yoshizane, and sets off as the monk Chudai to hunt for the beads. Needless to
say, the eight beads govern the structure of this massive 106-volume work as
its “yomihon framework.”
The sources Bakin drew upon in fashioning the story of Fusehime and
Yatsufusa have been discussed, but to date hardly anything has been written
about the origins of Tamazusa and her vengeful spirit.12 Most likely, the
source was Kyōden’s Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi, as is evident from three
elements common to both plots. First, the vengeful spirit of a murdered
woman brings suffering upon her enemy by possessing her own son –
Tamazusa’s spirit initially possesses a tanuki, then moves to a puppy raised
on its milk – and causing him to fall in love with her enemy’s daughter.
Second, a person with mysterious powers derived from Buddhism, or the
power of Buddhism itself, saves the characters, including the spirit. Third, a
retainer of the cursed family takes Buddhist vows and plays a prominent role
in the story. The chief discrepancy between the two works concerns the
theme of jealousy, which stands at the core of Akebono sōshi but is not
emphasized in Hakkenden, which stresses the “manly” character of
Fusehime and her devotion to her parents instead. In addition, while the
theme of Buddhist salvation does not figure in the central plot of Akebono
sōshi until the very end, in Hakkenden it is present from the start through
Fusehime’s faith and the assistance she is given by En no Gyōja, and the
opening section of the story ends with both Fusehime and the evil
Tamazusa’s vengeful spirit, now pacified, achieving enlightenment together.
In short, in creating the plotline relating to Tamazusa’s angry spirit, Bakin
drew upon, but also reworked, the basic set of relationships in Akebono sōshi.
His achievement might be viewed as an indication that he had to some extent
succeeded, after much trial and error, in overcoming Kyōden’s yomihon.
Nonetheless, we find in Kinsei mono no hon Edo sakusha burui (Modern Fiction:
A Classification of Edo Authors, written from the seventh day of the twelfth
month, 1833, to the fifth day of the first month, 1834) – a collection of sketches
of other authors that Bakin wrote at the age of sixty-seven, in the twelfth

12
Takada Mamoru has suggested that the story of Fusehime and Yatsufusa is a combina-
tion of the story of the divine dog Pan Hu in the Chinese Wudaishi (History of the Five
Dynasties), of Kenjishi in Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace), and of the folk tale “Inu
mukoiri” (The Dog Bridegroom). See Takada Mamoru, Kanpon hakkenden no sekai
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005).

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 yofl ji ofl taka

month of 1833 – that his attitude toward Kyōden remained as ambivalent as

ever. Indeed, until his death at the age of eighty-two, on the sixth day of the
eleventh month of 1848, Bakin would continue to be acutely conscious of
Kyōden. While Bakin has come to be regarded as the preeminent yomihon
author, a firm grasp of the role Kyōden played in the genre, and of Bakin’s
relationship to him, is essential to an accurate understanding of late yomihon.

(Translated by Michael Emmerich)

550
 part v
*

THE MODERN PERIOD

(1868 TO PRESENT)
 56
Introduction: nation building, literary
culture, and language
tomi suzuki

In 1868, a new political regime was established. Bearing the reign name Meiji
(literally “enlightened reign”), it replaced the 260-year-old Tokugawa system
in which the shogunate in Edo ruled over two hundred semi-autonomous
domains. Since the opening of Japan in the 1850s, when the Tokugawa
shogunate was forced to sign treaties with major Western powers, thereby
conceding control over tariffs and rights of extraterritoriality, the shogunate
and then later the Meiji government became increasingly aware of wider
geopolitical conditions and actively adopted international law to preserve the
country’s independence. From the early 1870s to the 1900s, Japan rapidly
emerged as an industrial nation-state, transforming and centralizing its poli-
tical, economic, and military systems and social structure. After major
victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–5), the long-sought revisions of the unequal treaties were realized:
extraterritoriality was abolished in 1899, and tariff autonomy was regained
in 1911. At the same time, Japan joined the Western imperial nations in
territorial expansion, colonizing Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. This
introduction focuses on these long three decades, from the early 1870s to
the turn of the century, paying particular attention to major developments in
media, journalism, the educational system, literacy, and practices of writing
and reading in the larger sociopolitical context.
Following the “abolition of local domains and the establishment of prefec-
tures” (haihan chiken) in 1871 and the “abolition of the four-class system” (shimin
byōdō) in 1870–1, the Meiji government attempted to construct a new political
structure through three new systems: compulsory primary education for all
children (established in 1872, following French and American models), national
conscription (ordered in 1872–3), and land tax reform (proclaimed in 1872). As
they eliminated the privileges of the samurai class and attempted to transform
the highly stratified Tokugawa social system into a more fluid, merit-based

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order, the leaders of the Meiji regime made use of the Western Enlightenment
ideal of an independent individual (free of the restraints imposed by traditional
society) who could simultaneously serve the nation.
The new Meiji state also actively promoted the spread of new knowledge
through newspapers, journals, printed books, and school textbooks. Such
works as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help – translated in 1871 as Saigoku risshi-hen by
the Confucian scholar Nakamura Masanao (1832–91) – and the progressive
scholar and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi’s (1834–1901) Gakumon no susume
(Encouragement of Learning, 1872–6) were adopted as textbooks for elemen-
tary schools and had an enormous influence on the dissolution of the four-
class system and the dissemination of new social ideals. Fukuzawa’s book,
which opens with the celebrated phrase “Heaven did not create man above
another nor under another” (inspired by the US Declaration of
Independence), emphasized the independence of the individual as the basis
of the independence of a nation.
From the end of the 1860s, Fukuzawa actively introduced and popularized
liberal political economy and Western Enlightenment notions of natural
human rights, freedom, and individual equality through works such as
Seiyō jijō (Affairs of the West, 1866–70) and Gakumon no susume, which were
widely read. Fukuzawa continued to express strong concern about the
“absence of the nation” in Japan, stating that Japan “has not reached the
level of the West in scholarship, business, and law – the foundation of
civilization and the basis of the country’s independence” – primarily because
the “government is as despotic as before and the people continue to be
stupid, spiritless, and powerless” despite recent changes in government
(Encouragement, 1874).
Toward the end of 1873, a group of leading scholars and intellectuals, who
played important roles in Meiji nation building as government officials,
advisors, or educators, and who shared similar concerns with Fukuzawa,
formed a “society of science, technique, and literature” called Meirokusha, or
the Meiji 6th Year (1873) Society, and established the journal Meiroku zasshi
(1874–5) in order to “advance and popularize Enlightenment education.”
Like Fukuzawa and Nakamura Masanao (who also translated John Stuart
Mill’s On Liberty in 1872), many of the Meirokusha members, such as Nishi
Amane (1829–97), Nishimura Shigeki (1828–1902), Tsuda Mamichi
(1829–1903), and Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916), had been sent abroad by the
Tokugawa shogunate to investigate European and American systems and
subsequently played central roles in introducing, translating, and teaching
Western law, political thought, economics, science, and philosophy. Their

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 Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language

articles and translations, published in Meiroku zasshi, were arguably the most
influential publications of the 1870s, addressing a wide range of topics from
education to religion, science, government, foreign policy, finance, and the
reform of writing. These Enlightenment intellectuals were all deeply influ-
enced by the notions of civilization and social progress presented in François
Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe (French original 1828; four English
translations between 1837 and 1846) and Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization
in England (1856–61), and shared a strong awareness that Japan was at a “half-
civilized” stage (the “universal stage of evolution” from uncivilized to the
civilized). In particular, they were concerned with the “character of the
people”; they called for the development of a nation (kokumin) as an essential
precondition for Japan’s independence among advanced Western countries,
and emphasized the importance of adopting the “spirit of civilization” as
practiced in the West.
Meanwhile, the oligarchic government aggressively promoted a policy of
“developing national prosperity and military strength” after leading members
of the early Meiji government – Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), Kido
Takayoshi (1833–77), Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), and Itō Hirobumi
(1841–1909) – came back from an eighteen-month embassy to the United
States and Europe (the so-called Iwakura mission, 1871–3), where they wit-
nessed first-hand the modern system of industrial capitalism and its infra-
structure. As the oligarchic government proceeded to rapidly modernize and
industrialize, from the mid 1870s through the 1880s, a popular rights move-
ment called the “Freedom and People’s Rights movement” (jiyū minken undō)
spread widely, calling for a representative parliament, reduction of land tax,
and the abolition of unequal treaties. Initially, the movement mainly
attracted discontented former samurai (who had been deprived of their social
privileges under the new Meiji regime), but in time it also drew in progressive
intellectuals and middle- to large-propertied farmers who sought local repre-
sentation. Despite increasing government hostility, the movement spread
rapidly from the late 1870s, encompassing various classes and regions and
reaching a peak in 1880, when over 240,000 people signed a petition calling for
the establishment of a parliament.
Behind the rapid rise of the People’s Rights movement was the fact that
Western Enlightenment ideals and liberal political thought had been popu-
larized by the Meirokusha scholars and spread widely by newspapers and
textbooks. Publishing and print culture, based primarily on woodblock
printing, had flourished in the Tokugawa period, but movable-type printing
began to be used with increasing frequency, with a sharp turn to movable

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type in 1883. From 1872–4, the so-called “large newspaper” (ōshinbun), cen-
tered on political discussions and written in kanbun (Literary Sinitic or
classical Chinese) appeared. Their articles were read aloud in “newspaper
explanation sessions.” From 1874–7, the so-called “small newspapers” (koshin-
bun) emerged, written in easier, colloquial styles, using the kana syllabary,
and addressed to less educated readers. Many late Edo popular fiction writers
and nativist studies scholars became reporters and writers for the small
newspapers, which provided town news as well as serial fiction. A number
of these newspapers, particularly the “large newspapers,” became key instru-
ments for the political parties of the 1880s.
As the People’s Rights movement spread, the government shifted from
the progressive, egalitarian educational policy of the 1870s to one that
emphasized loyalty to the emperor and that reintroduced traditional ethics.
In 1880, textbooks “interfering with national peace” were prohibited, and in
1880–1 Fukuzawa’s Gakumon no susume and Nakamura’s translation of
Smiles’s Self-Help were excluded from the government list of textbooks.
In the early 1880s, Fukuzawa’s views themselves changed, shifting from an
emphasis on individual independence to a focus on national unity, which
he considered necessary in the face of accelerated Western imperialism.
Katō Hiroyuki, another Meirokusha member who had introduced the
theory of natural human rights and became the first president of Tokyo
University in 1877, moved his emphasis from natural rights to national
competition and survival, evoking Spencer’s social Darwinism. This trig-
gered fierce criticism in the media from the popular rights activists, who
also based their political ideals on Spencer (Spencer’s Social Statics, fully
translated and published in 1882, was called one of the “three must-read
translations for popular rights,” along with those of Mill’s On Liberty and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, translated in 1882).
Recognizing the inevitability of a national assembly, Itō Hirobumi, who
later became the first prime minister under a cabinet system that he himself
established (in 1885), went to Prussia from 1882 to 1883 to study the constitu-
tion, the parliamentary system, and government institutions. Placing severe
limits on speech, publication, associations, and assembly, particularly after a
series of violent incidents, the Meiji government attempted to absorb the
People’s Rights movement into state nationalism, particularly as modeled
after Hohenzollern Prussia-Germany, in which Bismarck established a mod-
ern dynastic nation-state in reaction to the popular national movements that
proliferated in Europe in the 1820s. By 1885, the major political parties that
had formed at the height of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement

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 Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language

were forced to dissolve, and by the late 1880s political energy was aggres-
sively redirected toward a new stage of national consolidation, in anticipation
of the opening of the national Diet in 1890.
The national constitution promulgated in 1889 legally defined all indivi-
duals as “equal subjects” of the emperor, whose “sacred” power was used to
construct the centralized nation-state. The Diet opened in 1890 with little
over 1 percent of the entire population given a right to vote for members of
the House of Representatives: suffrage was limited to high-tax-paying males
above the age of twenty-five. (Male universal suffrage was realized in 1925,
and universal suffrage did not occur until 1945, during the Occupation
period.) In 1890, the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated to
create a collective sense of the nation through moral education based on filial
piety and loyalty.
In the 1880s, the government simultaneously promoted radical westerni-
zation and modernization, accommodating the demands by the Western
treaty powers that Japan adopt Western administrative, legal, and commer-
cial practices. While popular rights activists were strongly opposed to the
oligarchic government’s radical westernization policy, they believed that the
people needed reform to achieve national independence. This tide led to
parallel reform movements in writing, fiction, and women’s issues, all of
which developed in close relationship to changes in education, literacy, print
technology, and publishing culture.
Vernacularization, orthographic reform, and standardization of the writ-
ten language emerged as interrelated concerns from the early 1870s, as part of
a larger attempt to promote communication and circulation of information
across class and regional boundaries. In the late 1860s, Maejima Hisoka (1835–
1919), a scholar of Western learning who founded a national postal service in
the 1870s, proposed to abolish the use of kanji (Chinese script) to facilitate
literacy and education. Although Maejima’s proposal was mostly ignored at
the time, observations about the efficiency of an alphabet led to the reevalua-
tion of the kana phonetic script (Maejima himself established a newspaper
written in kana in 1873). While the Enlightenment scholars of the Meirokusha
group, most notably Fukuzawa Yukichi, attempted to employ easier-to-
understand written styles that they developed through public speeches, the
basis of written styles for authoritative genres, including translations from
European languages, continued to be the kanbun style or the kanbun-kundoku
style, based on reading conventions for classical Chinese using Japanese
syntax. In fact, with the spread of education, kanbun and Kangaku (the
study of classical Chinese writings) became an important pillar of primary

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and secondary education in the 1880s, even more than during the Tokugawa
period, at least in terms of population. In the early 1880s Kangaku private
academies flourished, and as the government attempted to revive Confucian
ethics in the face of the popular rights movement, reprinting of classical
Chinese texts in movable type became popular due to the increase in kanbun
literacy.
During the so-called Rokumeikan period of radical westernization, an
orthographic reform movement emerged in the form of the Kana-no-kai
(Society for the Promotion of the Kana Syllabary, est. 1883) and the Rōmaji-
kai (Society for the Promotion of Romanization, est. 1885). Under the impact
of the Western phonetic alphabet, both societies promoted the phonogram,
considering it easier and more efficient to learn than numerous Chinese
characters, and pushed for colloquialization and standardization of written
styles. In a short book entitled Genbun-itchi (Unification of Spoken and
Written Languages, 1886), Mozume Takami (1847–1928), a leading member
of the Kana-no-kai and professor at the Imperial University, promoted the
notion of genbun-itchi: “What emerges from one’s own heart (hara) is alive
since it is natural, but copying others is dead since it is not genuine . . . I
consequently believe that it is most desirable to abolish the parrot-like, non-
functional, conventionalized written languages, and to directly transcribe the
vigorous, living discourse that spontaneously and naturally flows from our
mouths.” The newly introduced technology of stenography – which was
referred to as “transcription of speech” – also contributed to the phonocentric
conception of language. While promoting “writing as one speaks,” however,
Mozume expressed concerns about the abundant use of honorifics in the
Japanese spoken language and urged the creation of a concise expository
written style free of the complex honorific system used in daily conversation.
The reform of written styles was also vigorously discussed and practiced
by intellectuals who proposed a “reform of fiction.” From around 1880, the
advocates of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement attempted to
popularize their political ideals through the novel, calling for a new fiction
to “free people from evil customs” and to “disseminate the ideals of freedom
and equality.” This concern became urgent in 1883, when the government
stiffened its restrictions on the publication of newspapers (“large newspapers”
in particular) and on public gatherings. Inspired by politically influential
European writers such as Victor Hugo and Benjamin Disraeli, ambitious
young activists began writing “political novels,” freely adapting from late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European historical romances by
Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, using the late Edo yomihon narrative

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 Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language

style, and following the plot pattern of Ming and Qing period Chinese
historical fiction like The Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan, c. fourteenth century).
In 1883–4, Yano Ryūkei (1851–1931), a major member of the political party
Rikken Kaishintō and an executive journalist of the newspaper Yūbin hōchi
shinbun, wrote one of the most enthusiastically received political novels of
the time: Keikoku bidan (Commendable Anecdotes on Creating a Nation,
1883–4). In the preface to the second part, Ryūkei wrote that there were four
major written styles currently in use: kanbun (classical Chinese), wabun
(classical Japanese), ōbun-chokuyaku (“direct-translation-of-European-lan-
guage,” a heavily Sinitic mixed style used from the 1870s to translate
European languages, which incorporated features of Western languages),
and zokugo-rigen styles, the “vernacular styles” used in Edo popular narrative
fiction. He noted that each of these styles had its own stylistic property and
merit: the kanbun style was suited for heroic and graceful (hisō tenga) matters,
the wabun style for soft and gentle (yūjū onwa) manners, the ōbun-chokuyaku
style for detailed and precise (chimitsu seikaku) content, and the zokugo-
rigen style for humorous and variegated (kokkei kyokusetsu) topics. Ryūkei
proposed a new contemporary style that combined all four. His Keikoku
bidan, which was dictated using the newly developed shorthand, blends
some wabun and vernacular style elements (similar to Bakin’s yomihon
style) into a narrative that consisted primarily of a mixture of high-toned
kanbun-based styles (including classical Chinese-style poetry and abundant
rhythmical parallel phrases) and the heavily Sinitic “direct-translation-of-
European-language” style.
In subsequent years, Ryūkei’s primary concern in reforming written styles
shifted to creating a new standard style for what he called futsūsho (popular
works) – by which he meant practical writings for a general audience,
including government proclamations, school textbooks, newspapers, and
letters – in contradistinction to styles for what he called bungakusho (literary
works), including academic treatises and belles-lettres. In March 1886, Ryūkei
published Nihon buntai moji shinron (New Theory of Japanese Written Styles
and Orthography), which he had dictated during a stay in Europe and
America (1884–5). Here Ryūkei advocated what he called ryōbun-tai (“double
writing style,” or kanbun-kundoku style with kana glosses for Chinese
characters), which was, he argued, developed in the late Edo narrative fiction
by Bakin and used in Meiji popular newspapers. The merit of the “double
writing style” was that it combined the readability of the kanbun-kundoku
style with the accessibility of the kana style. The ryōbun-tai also had the
educational function of introducing kanji and kanbun-kundoku style to

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beginners. While arguing against the advocates of exclusive kana writing or

of Romanization, Ryūkei proposed a reduction of kanji in daily use to three
thousand characters for “popular works” to make them easy to read for
everybody. Ryūkei states that while bungakusho should combine all existing
styles, futsūsho should primarily use a vernacular style close to speech, which
would be the basis for a new “double writing style” and serve as a practical
writing style for a wide audience.
In April 1886, one month after the publication of Yano Ryūkei’s New Theory
of Japanese Written Styles and Orthography, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) pub-
lished “Buntairon” (Theory of Written Styles) as part of his influential Shōsetsu
shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885–6). While the reform of fiction had
been proposed in the early 1880s in an attempt to disseminate new political
ideals widely, Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel emphasizes the autonomous cultural
value of the novel, severing its significance from direct political or moral
efficacy. Shōyō stresses the value of the novel in terms of “Art” (bijutsu), a
recently imported Western notion, the function of which should elevate
people’s mind and spirit through aesthetic, emotional, and affective pleasure.
Lumping together various different past genres hitherto not conceived as a
unified category, Shōyō traces the “universal development of fiction
(shōsetsu)” from mythology to romance/fable/allegory to the novel and
proclaims that the most advanced form of shōsetsu, the “true novel,” is the
Western “artistic, realistic novel.” He contrasts this with the “less advanced”
kind of allegorical, “didactic novel” to which, Shōyō claims, most of the best
Japanese fiction since Bakin belongs. Significantly, movable-type reprinting of
early nineteenth-century gesaku fiction – such as yomihon by Bakin, ninjōbon
by Shunsui, and kokkeibon by Sanba – appeared from the 1880s and became
popular among new readers. Shōyō was also clearly aware of the popularity
of contemporary political novels such as Yano Ryūkei’s Keikoku bidan, which
had elevated the image and status of fiction among educated youth, including
the young Shōyō himself. In contradistinction to the contemporary political
novel, in which women usually figure allegorically as metaphors for
oppressed people or popular rights, or as figures supporting the male fighters,
Shōyō placed a new focus on the private, affective world of contemporary
everyday life, and emphasized the centrality of “love between a man and a
woman” (airen – later ren’ai, a neologism and translation of the Western
word “love”) as the primary subject for the “artistic, realistic novel.” Shōyō
moved in this direction in writing novels such as Tōsei shosei katagi (Manners
and Lives of Contemporary Students, 1885–6) and Imotose kagami (Mirror of
Marriage, 1886).

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Following Bakin’s earlier discussion of literary language – which was

formulated under the influence of Ming and Qing Chinese vernacular fiction
– Shōyō distinguishes among three literary styles: (1) gabun-tai, a “gentle and
elegant classical style”; (2) zokubun-tai, a “lively colloquial style that tran-
scribed contemporary spoken language”; and (3) gazoku-setchū-tai, an amal-
gamation of “elegant” and “colloquial” styles. Equating gabun with wabun
(classical Japanese prose), Shōyō says that its “soft, gentle, graceful, and
elegant” quality is well suited to describing elegant and refined manners,
but that this elegant style is limited since it cannot depict “fervent feelings,
heroic actions or grand and sublime states.” Instead, Shōyō values the
“clarity” and “vigor” of the colloquial style for its potential to depict vividly
contemporary manners; but, due to the great distance in Japan between the
spoken language and written language, the actual spoken language, which
tends to be “vulgar, unrefined, and verbose,” cannot be used in an artistic
novel except in dialogue. The colloquial style should be used for speech,
particularly that of lower-class characters, but the narrative needs to be
written in an appropriate blend of the elegant and colloquial styles.
Shōyō’s views of literary language for new fiction overlap to a certain
extent with Yano Ryūkei’s, but Shōyō’s clear avoidance of the kanbun or
Sinitic styles reveals his fundamental attitude toward contemporary political
fiction, the most popular of which was Ryūkei’s Keikoku bidan, written in the
manner of Bakin’s Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Chronicle of the Eight Dogs
of the Nansō Satomi Clan, 1814–42) as well as The Water Margin, especially in
terms of plot development, allegorical characterization, and high-toned style.
As Shōyō reveals in “Bunshō shinron” (New Theory of Written Styles, May
and July 1886), he tried to sever novel writing from the high-toned Sinitic
kanbun-kundoku style as well as from the 7–5 syllabic rhythms of Bakin’s
yomihon style, which he viewed as locked into conventional patterns. Shōyō
wanted to avoid the oral tonality of the Sinitic style found in Ryūkei’s Keikoku
bidan and Tōkai Sanshi’s (1852–1922) Kajin no kigū (Chance Meetings with
Beautiful Women, 1885–8, 1891, 1897), the two most enthusiastically received
political novels, which were often recited aloud by groups of young, politi-
cally ardent students. At the same time, Shōyō differentiated his position
from the promoters of genbun-itchi, who he claimed naively advocated
“writing as one speaks” without trying to create a new expressive written
style.
As Maeda Ai has pointed out, the shift from woodblock printing to movable-
type printing in the early to mid 1880s corresponded to the shift from “com-
munal reading” (associated with oral reading and the rhythmic patterns of

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Bakin’s yomihon and Meiji political novels) to “solitary reading” and a diversi-
fication of reading practices. Shōyō’s presence as a respected university grad-
uate, one who advocated the new novel (with a new focus on private life in
contemporary society) both in theory and in practice, inspired and encouraged
younger intellectuals such as Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), who created new
experimental colloquial styles in his translations of Russian novels and explored
the social and moral dilemma of an inward-looking youth in contemporary
Meiji society in the novel Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887–9).
New notions of the novel were also promoted in Jogaku zasshi (Women’s
Education Magazine, 1885–1904), which was founded in 1885 and provided the
main forum for progressive male and female intellectuals to advocate the
social and cultural advancement of women. “Reform of women” surfaced as
one of the central concerns of the new nation builders, as seen in debates in
Meiroku zasshi. Translations of feminist thought by Spencer, Mill, and Henry
and Millicent Fawcett appeared from the end of the 1870s to the early 1880s, at
the height of the Freedom and People’s Rights movement, but most of these
translations emphasized the notion of natural rights rather than women’s
rights. From the mid 1880s, however, renewed attention was given to the
status of women, now regarded as a key indicator of the nation’s level
of civilization. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s series of discussions on women and
male–female relations in “Nihon fujin ron” (On Japanese Women, 1885),
“Danjo-kōsai ron” (On Male–Female Relationships, 1886), and other essays
exemplified this new trend.
Emphasizing that women should develop certain specialized skills to
achieve independence, Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942), the progressive
Christian educator and editor in chief of Jogaku zasshi, cited women’s aptitude
for writing and encouraged educated women to write good novels, particu-
larly for women, addressing issues not yet raised by recent new male nov-
elists (“Women and Writing as Profession,” 1887). Iwamoto considered the
home to be a key social domain for women – managing the household,
helping the husband, educating the children – but he encouraged women to
contribute to society through their writing and moral influence. Progressive
women associated with Jogaku zasshi, such as Nakajima (née Kishida)
Toshiko (literary name Shōen, 1864–1901) and Shimizu Toyoko (literary
name Shikin, 1868–1933), had participated in the popular rights movement;
they now turned to writing, believing in the social and moral efficacy of the
novel, and encouraged other women to write. Many of them addressed such
issues as women’s education, friendship, aspirations for independence, mar-
riage, and the family system. The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education

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reintroduced a Confucian gender hierarchy within the family, while the Civil
Codes of 1898 further strengthened the concept of the ie (house/family) and
stipulated that all property had to be inherited by the oldest son, ultimately
tying the family structure to the patriarchal emperor system. A gender-
segregated secondary education system was formally institutionalized by
the 1899 Ordinance for Women’s Higher Schools; here “women’s higher
school” was positioned at the level of men’s “middle school” with the “higher
school” and the university open only to men. Women as readers and writers,
however, continued to increase as attendance at the women’s higher school
rapidly grew and as journalism expanded.
As the popular rights movement was suppressed and redirected toward
national consolidation, a new generation of young intellectuals, exemplified
by Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), differentiated their positions from those of the
state modernizers in the oligarchic government. Inheriting Enlightenment
and popular rights ideals but still criticizing his “allies in the People’s Rights
movement” for “distorting true Anglo-Saxon liberalism,” Tokutomi Sohō
advocated “industrialism, commoner-ism (heimin-shugi), and pacifism” in his
book Shōrai no Nihon (The Future Japan, 1886). Sohō, relying on a recently
published section of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (“Political Institutions,”
1882), argued for an evolution from an aristocratic, military social structure
toward a democratic, industrial society, which Sohō claimed Japan was now
undergoing. Taking into consideration Japan’s climate, geographical posi-
tion, and geopolitical environment, Sohō claimed that it was ideally situated
for industry and trade. With the proceeds from the successful sales of The
Future Japan, he then established a general-interest magazine called Kokumin
no tomo (The Nation’s Friend, 1887–98), which provided a major forum for a
new generation of progressive intellectuals and writers.
Presenting a related but alternative view of Japan’s future was a group of
young intellectuals, centered on Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945) and Shiga
Shigetaka (1863–1927), who established a magazine called Nihonjin (The
Japanese) in 1888. Together with the journalist Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907),
who created the politically oriented newspaper Nihon (Japan) in 1889, they
argued that a strong national spirit (kokusui) and the preservation of cultural
autonomy were essential for national independence in an age of imperialism.
Unlike the Meirokusha intellectuals of the 1870s, they shared a belief in a
unique Japanese character, one formed by specific historical and environ-
mental forces; Japan had a mission to develop this unique national character
not only for itself but for world civilization, which they saw as progressing
through competition among different cultures.

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In Nihon fūkeiron (Landscape of Japan, 1894), which is said to have been

one of the most widely read books among students in the latter half of the
Meiji period, Shiga Shigetaka depicted Japan’s “elegant, beautiful, and
powerful” environment by interlacing kanshi, waka, and haiku with detailed
observations of natural landscape. Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), an influen-
tial Christian leader, social critic, and frequent contributor to Kokumin no
tomo and Nihonjin, called Shiga the “Japanese Ruskin” and argued that “both
from its geographical position and its historical formation, Japan has the
special potential to merge Asian and European features,” to be a “mediator
between the East and the West” (Chijinron or Theory of Earth and Man,
1894). From the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) to the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–5), essays on Japan’s unique cultural heritage emerged, stressing its
position as a bridge between Eastern and Western civilizations. Those
published in English included Uchimura’s Japan and the Japanese (1894),
Nitobe Inazō’s (1862–1933) Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), and Okakura
Kakuzō’s (literary name Tenshin, 1862–1913) The Ideals of the East, with
Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904),
and The Book of Tea (1906).
Within this discursive context a new notion of bungaku (“literature”)
rapidly assumed cultural importance from the late 1880s onward. The term
bungaku, which originated in Confucius’ Analects and meant “learning,”
“studies,” or “scholars” (“official Confucian scholars” in particular), was
adopted as a translation of the Western word “literature” in 1870 by the
Meirokusha scholar Nishi Amane. Two interrelated modern Western notions
were introduced: first, the broader, eighteenth-century Enlightenment
notion of humanities, and second, the newer, nineteenth-century, more
specialized notion of aesthetic and imaginative literature. These intertwined
notions of bungaku were reflected in the shifting institutional categorizations
of academic disciplines.
Tokyo University was established in 1877 with four divisions: law, science,
humanities (bungaku), and medicine. The central emphasis was overwhel-
mingly on Western learning. Out of concern for the loss of the wakan
(Japanese and Chinese classics) studies, the president Katō Hiroyuki (a former
Meirokusha member) established the Classics Training Course (Koten kō-
shūka) in 1882 as an ad hoc annex to the division of humanities. When
Tokyo University became the Imperial University in 1886, the Classics
Training Course was abolished as part of a large-scale educational reform
under the Minister of Education Mori Arinori (1847–89), a founding member
of Meirokusha and one of the major promoters of Westernization. The

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Imperial University was then divided into five Colleges: Law (incorporating
political science and economics, which used to be part of the humanities
division), Medicine, Engineering, Humanities (bunka daigaku), and Science.
The College of Humanities initially consisted of the Departments of
Philosophy, Japanese Classics (wabungaku), Chinese Classics (kanbungaku),
and Linguistics (hakugengaku). In the following year (1887) it added the
Departments of History (Western history), English Literature, and German
Literature, and in 1889 it created the Department of Japanese History
(kokushi), making “national literature” (kokubungaku) and “national history”
two separate disciplines for the first time.
In 1890, the first modern literary histories and anthologies of “national
literature” were published by several university graduates of the new koku-
bungaku (national literature) department. Mikami Sanji (1865–1939) and
Takatsu Kuwasaburō’s (1864–1921) two-volume Nihon bungakushi (History
of Japanese Literature, 1890) was the first full-length literary history, with
abundant excerpts from ancient to the late Edo periods. Such literary
histories considered literature to be “reflections of national life” and tried
to present, through concrete literary examples, the “development of the
mentality of the nation” so that “the nation’s people would deepen their
love for the nation” and that “the national spirit would be elevated.” In
stressing the continuity and progress of the “national spirit” as signs of a
civilized and advanced nation, the perspective of these Meiji literary histories
was clearly shaped by nineteenth-century European historiography, particu-
larly Hippolyte Taine’s (1828–93) History of English Literature (1864; English
translation, 1872), and by Spencerian evolutionism.
While these Meiji scholars continued to use the earlier Confucian notion of
bungaku to mean “learning” or “studies,” they dissociated the content of that
learning from Confucian studies and criticized the Confucian view of bun-
gaku for “disdaining fiction and belles-lettres,” thereby affirming the recent
elevation of the shōsetsu as a respected genre. At the same time, Meiji literary
historians emphasized that leisurely activities such as writing fiction and
composing elegant wabun (classical Japanese-style prose), waka (classical
Japanese-style poetry) and kanshi (classical Chinese-style poetry) represented
only a small part of the larger enterprise of bungaku. For Meiji literary
historians, gakumon (learning) consisted of two large areas: bungaku and
kagaku (science), and bungaku in turn embraced a large body of writings
that included both bibungaku (elegant writing, or belles-lettres) and ribungaku
(rational or intellectual writing), which spanned history, philosophy, and
political science. This broad notion of bungaku was, as we have seen,

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institutionalized in 1877 with the establishment of Western academic disci-

plines at Tokyo University.
While Meiji literary historians emphasized the comprehensiveness of
bungaku as humanities, they had to deal with the narrower definition of
bungaku, of literature as bibungaku or what they also referred to as junbun-
gaku (pure literature), which “skillfully expresses human thought, feeling, and
imagination by means of certain styles: its purpose is to be practical and to
create pleasure; and it transmits basic knowledge to the majority of people.”
Mikami and Takatsu emphasized that while practical efficacy is the common
attribute of bungaku in a broad sense, “pure literature” is characterized by
both its practical function and its spiritual pleasure. This emphasis on spiritual
pleasure strongly echoes Shōsetsu shinzui’s advocacy of the novel and the
influence of Victorian literary discourse, as represented in particular by
Matthew Arnold.
Following Taine’s History of English Literature, Mikami and Takatsu
attempted to define national character through Japanese national literature
(kokubungaku):
Each of the nations in the world has its own unique and distinct character
and mentality. What has been recently discussed as the national spirit
(kokusui) clearly manifests itself in each country’s national literature.
Japanese people are full of reverence for gods and full of loyalty to their
lord; the Chinese value proper decorum and order; and since both peoples
(Japanese and Chinese) respect righteousness and loyalty, their literature,
including their fiction, tends to focus on moral justice. Westerners espouse
the ideals of freedom and rights, and they have high respect for women.
Even among the Western nations, the English are calm and practical,
whereas the French are gallant and tend to be emotional. Thus the literatures
of the English and the French respectively manifest the distinct traits of their
national characters. Generally speaking, Japanese literature can be character-
ized as elegant and graceful, Chinese literature as grand and heroic, and
Western literature as precise, detailed, and exhaustive.

Under the impact of the Western phonetic alphabet, the modern scholars of
Japanese national literature designated phonetic kana-based wabun or classi-
cal Japanese-style writing from the Heian period as the basis of Japanese
“national language,” in contradistinction to kanbun (texts in the classical
Chinese style), which was now regarded as foreign or Chinese. Indeed,
Mikami and Takatsu excluded all kanbun texts from the body of the national
literature. This exclusion also reinforced the new idea of literature as belles-
lettres or pure literature, since the major body of historical, philosophical,

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religious, and political writings in Japan had been written in the kanbun style.
That the History of Japanese Literature characterized Japan’s “national litera-
ture and national character” as “elegant and graceful” was apparently due to
their view of phonetic wabun as the basis of the Japanese national literature
and their promotion of the new idea of bungaku as “elegant, pure literature.”
The terms used here were similar to the ways in which Yano Ryūkei and
Tsubouchi Shōyō associated kanbun, wabun, and Western writing styles
with particular rhetorical modes, but the written styles and rhetorical
modes were now associated with national character.
In the newly constructed body of national literature, from which all the
texts written in kanbun were eliminated, Heian works written in kana were
highly valued for developing “Japanese” literary genres such as the monogatari
(tale), nikki (diary), and kikō (travel diary), which these literary historians saw
as reflecting the “internal life” of the period as opposed to the “external state
of the period recorded in kanbun texts.” In accordance with Shōyō’s evolu-
tionist view of genre, they considered prose in general to be a more advanced
literary form than verse, reversing a long-held genre hierarchy, and gave new
attention to Heian vernacular prose texts, particularly prose fiction (mono-
gatari). Valued most was The Tale of Genji, which was recanonized as the great
predecessor to the refined, realistic novel. But while the first modern scholars
of national literature highly praised the Genji as the highest achievement of
Heian literature, they could not hide their dissatisfaction with the “tendency
of its style to be monotonous and spiritless,” which they noted was a
“weakness of wabun style” and which they blamed on female authorship.
Indeed, the Meiji scholars of national literature valued the “more vigorous
and manly” “Japanese-Chinese mixed style” (wakan konkōbun) that was
developed in the medieval and Tokugawa periods, which they believed
fused yamato kotoba (Japanese words) and kango (Chinese words) into a higher
style. In line with an evolutionist historical narrative, they glorified the
“remarkable progress of national literature” in the Tokugawa period, parti-
cularly the “vast expansion of literary genres” that “embraced both upper and
lower classes.” The central concern was to emphasize the continuous “devel-
opment and progress” of Japanese national literature, implicitly calling for its
further progress through active incorporation of aspects of Western lan-
guages and literatures.
This position was shared by the influential Shin-kokubun (New National
Written Language) movement, which promoted an updated wabun-based
mixed style (instead of the dominant, kanbun-based mixed style) both for the
new standard writing and for the new literary language. This movement was

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initiated in 1890 by the classical Japanese scholar and waka poet Ochiai
Naobumi (1861–1903), a graduate of the Classics Training Course, and soon
supported by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) and others. After his return from a five-
year stay in Germany as a medical officer, Ōgai, who had received solid
training in classical Chinese learning before studying German, started to
experiment with different literary styles and developed a unique experimen-
tal “Japanese-Chinese-Western” mixed style (wa-kan-yō konkōbun), which is
manifested in his translation of European poetry in the anthology Omokage
(Vestiges, 1889), on which he collaborated with Ochiai and a kanbun scholar
as well as with his younger sister. It is also apparent in the novellas that are
referred to as Ōgai’s “German trilogy”: “Maihime” (The Dancing Girl,
published in Kokumin no tomo in 1890), “Utakata no ki” (Foam on the
Waves, 1890), and “Fumi-zukai” (The Courier, 1891).
In the new discourse on national literature, The Tale of Genji occupied an
ambivalent position, as evident in Uchimura Kanzō’s notorious condemna-
tion of the work in a lecture delivered in 1894:
The Tale of Genji might have left beautiful language to Japan, but what has it
ever done to raise our moral spirit? Worse than doing nothing, the Genji has
made us effeminate cowards. I would like to exterminate such literature
[bungaku] from our ranks! (applause) . . . Literature is not such an idle, trifling
business. Literature is a weapon with which we must fight in the world,
against devilish enemies, in our attempt to improve our society and our
country . . . not just for today but for years to come.
The ambivalent mixture of praise and dissatisfaction that Meiji national
literary historians showed toward the Genji reflected the competing notions
of literature and literary language in the late 1880s to the 1900s, a period in
which various controversies occurred with regard to the moral, social,
aesthetic, and political value of literature, particularly of the novel. For
example, in the so-called Bungaku gokusui (or kyokusui) ronsō, a debate that
occurred in 1889–90 regarding “whether bungaku was declining or prosper-
ing,” many of those who saw a decline in literature complained that con-
temporary fiction (including works by Shōyō, Futabatei, and Ōgai) only
depicted the silly passions of male and female students and consequently
narrowed the range of the novel, the “true form” of which should depict the
“great ideals of the universe” and the “true feelings of great individuals for the
purpose of enlightening people.” By contrast, their opponents, who saw
bungaku as prospering, argued that the mission of the novel was to “reveal
the truth of life aesthetically and realistically by depicting contemporary
human feelings.” Despite their widely opposing views, these debates

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generated a widespread consensus about the importance of bungaku, calling

for “Great Literature,” the “Great Poet,” and a “national literature” (kokumin
bungaku) that could contribute to the “spirit of the nation.”
From the latter half of the 1880s, a new standard expository style called
futsūbun (standard written style), a mixed style based on more regularized
wabun syntax and less Sinitic syntax, developed, but kanbun remained the
basis of literacy and a central part of language education for both reading and
writing. This changed when the 1894 revised curriculum for the secondary
school eliminated mandatory composition in kanbun for the first time and
emphasized the “harmony” of kokugo (“national language,” defined at this
point as “writing mixed with kanji”) and kanbun, with kokugo as primary and
kanbun as subsidiary. Although the prestige of Sinitic writing drastically
depreciated following Japan’s victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War
(1894–5), multiple styles continued to be used, depending on the genre.
Various experimental colloquial styles also emerged that updated the dialo-
gue style used in late Edo popular fiction, that incorporated the new style of
public speech, or that came from the new practice of translating modern
Western literature. The new written styles were experimental hybrids repre-
sented by such notions as gazoku setchū-tai (high-low fused style) and wa-kan-
yō konkōbun (Japanese, Chinese, Western mixed style), which actually
allowed for various amalgams. These styles were conceived in terms of
overlapping, multiple registers, metaphorically associated with class (high/
low, noble/vulgar), gender (feminine/masculine), rhetorical modes (elegant
beauty, heroic, sublime), or nationality (Japanese, Chinese, Western).
However, from the early 1900s, particularly after Japan’s victory in
the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), the phonocentric ideology of the national
language emerged as the core of systematic national language policy, in
which the differences between the spoken and written languages as well as
differences among written styles were ideologically suppressed. Right before
the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), one of
the first university graduates of the national literature department and
the chief architect of the modern national language policy, returned from a
four-year research stay (1890–4) in Germany – where he had witnessed the
promotion of a standardized national language by the Deutscher
Sprachverein – and gave a lecture, “Kokugo to kokka to” (National
Language and the Nation, 1894), in which he referred to the “national
language” (kokugo) as the “spiritual blood binding the nation’s
people together.” In “Hyōjungo ni tsukite” (On a Standard Language, 1895)
Ueda argued that the establishment of a “standardized spoken language”

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(hyōjungo) – in contradistinction to regional dialects – was the foremost

priority for Japan’s development as a modern nation-state, and stressed the
interdependence of colloquialization and standardization. Ueda’s endeavor
resulted in the promotion of a standardized plain colloquial style, called the
genbun-itchi or “unification of the spoken and written languages” style, for
primary school textbooks, beginning in the early 1900s, when a state system
of primary school textbook compilation was established. The first state-
compiled textbooks regulated the number of kanji (500 characters were
introduced in the four-year primary school curriculum), standardized kana,
adopted phonetic orthography, and employed a new plain colloquial style for
the lower grades.
Competing notions of literature and literary languages coexisted until the
mid 1900s, but the novel rapidly rose in cultural status following the end of the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), when journalism expanded significantly. Terms
such as junbungaku or bibungaku, used since the 1890 in contradistinction to
the broader notion of bungaku (“learning,” “humanities,” “literature”), started
to disappear after this time, with bungaku beginning to refer distinctly to
literary art or aesthetic literature with the novel as the central genre. The so-
called Japanese Naturalist writers and critics gained an influential position
through newly established journals such as Shinchō (New Tides, est. 1904),
Waseda Bungaku (Second Series started in 1906), Bunshō sekai (World of
Writing, est. 1906 by the influential publishing company Hakubunkan), and
Taiyō (The Sun, arguably the most influential general-interest magazine of the
Meiji period, established by Hakubunkan in 1895). These magazines widely
promoted the newly institutionalized notion of genbun-itchi language.
Tayama Katai (1871–1930) published an essay, “Rokotsu-naru byōsha” (Raw
Description, February 1904), in Taiyō, in which he referred to the two most
respected and popular novelists of the time, Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) and
Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), as well as Tsubouchi Shōyō and Mori Ōgai, as “great
giants of the past” and attacked “contemporary advocates of artificial literary
techniques” as “slaves of literary style.” Katai criticized earlier Meiji literature
as “powdered, ornate writings” or “gold-plated literature” and proudly placed
the new movement toward “unadorned, bold description” in contemporary
Japanese writing alongside the new trends in Western literature, as exempli-
fied, in his words, by “fin-de-siècle revolutionaries” such as Henrik Ibsen, Leo
Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Gerhart
Hauptmann, and Hermann Sudermann. According to Katai, these Western
writers “destroyed the gold-plated literature” (of classicism and
Romanticism) by being “outspoken,” “truthful,” and “natural.”

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In an influential article titled “Bungeijō no shizenshugi” (Naturalism in

Literary Arts, Waseda bungaku, 1908), Shimamura Hōgetsu – a leading critic
who had become a professor of Aesthetics and English literature at
Waseda College in 1905 upon his return from a three-year stay in England
and Germany – pointed out that the recently emerged Japanese Naturalism, as
opposed to earlier Naturalism that “sought objective description under the
influence of Zola,” was a special current that appeared after Japanese intellec-
tuals experienced “Sturm und Drang or Romanticism from around 1901–2
(when enthusiastic zeal for Nietzsche and Aesthetic Life emerged) until 1904–
5.” Hōgetsu aligned recent Japanese Naturalism with European Impressionism,
Symbolism, and fin-de-siècle Decadence. All of these movements were under-
stood as further developments of European Naturalism, which they believed
liberated individuals by addressing social and moral problems and destroying
traditional social norms and literary forms.
Japanese Naturalist writers and critics promoted the genbun-itchi collo-
quial written language for its “clarity, directness, and immediacy,” seeing it as
suited to unaffected and sincere expression, and forcibly classified the existing
various mixed written styles into three distinct categories: (1) the “neoclassi-
cal” gabun style, (2) the classical Chinese-based kanbun style, and (3) the
modern colloquial genbun-itchi style. Now a clear line was drawn between
“outdated classical language” and “modern genbun-itchi language,” which
they promoted as a literary style for the novel of a new age. In reality, the
colloquial literary language of the early twentieth century novel had been
created largely through interaction with modern Western literature. It was
not so much “natural” or “transparent” (as it came to be regarded after the
mid 1920s, when the genbun-itchı̄ style had been thoroughly standardized
and naturalized) as fresh, exotic, and cosmopolitan.

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Kanshibun in the Meiji period and
beyond
matthew fraleigh

Sinitic genres flourished in the Meiji period with unprecedented splendor,

giving kanshibun (Sinitic poetry and prose) a ubiquity it had never had before.
A tremendous expansion of kanshi (Sinitic poetry) composition had taken
place in late Edo, aided on the one hand by newly introduced poetic theories
that promoted its naturalization and on the other by greater access to both
educational opportunities and printed reference materials, which facilitated
the acquisition of literacy and compositional proficiency in Literary Sinitic.
These trends continued into Meiji, when poetic societies devoted to kanshi
sprung up in both rural and urban areas, the social backgrounds of Japanese
kanshi poets further diversified, a broader range of female poets came to
participate, and new venues were established to showcase poetic production.
Yet it was not simply latent momentum from the Edo period that brought
about the brilliant florescence of kanshi during these years, for a variety of
distinctly Meiji period factors lay at its root. The dramatic political and
sociocultural shifts accompanying the Restoration stimulated poets with a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of new material, overseas experience opened
for them new vistas of expression, and engagement with other Sinospheric
poets, most importantly the contingent of Qing diplomats posted to Japan,
furnished them with new interlocutors and critics. Most crucial, however,
was the transformed Meiji media landscape, for it helped cultivate aspiring
poets by providing them ready access to models that they could emulate
while also fostering novel forms of poetic expression and interaction.
From our present-day vantage-point, kanshi composition may seem
stodgy and old-fashioned, but such a view only began to take hold in the
years between the late 1880s and early 1890s, when emerging “national
language” (kokugo) discourse drew the borders around the newly forged
canon of “national literature” (kokubungaku) in such a way as to exclude
kanshibun. As scholar Iritani Sensuke has observed, at least until this transi-
tion took place, kanshi appeared to be the type of verse that would be most

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conducive to addressing the changes that the new era had brought to Japan,
owing to its greater diversity of forms, its broader range of thematic content,
and its larger vocabulary.1 Many contemporary observers shared this view; in
1896, Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), a critic and poet who composed in both
Japanese and Chinese forms, declared matter-of-factly: “Comparing the
development of waka, haiku, and kanshi in the literary world at present,
kanshi are most advanced, haiku second, and waka third.” Significantly, Shiki
attributed the advanced status of Japanese kanshi not to the lingering pre-
sence of poets born prior to the Restoration but to the vitality of the younger
kanshi poets who were his peers.
Miura Kanō, the author of the most extensive scholarly treatment of Meiji
kanshi, divides the period into three parts: the first phase, from 1868 to 1880,
dominated by the poetry societies of Ōnuma Chinzan (1818–91) and Mori Shuntō
(1819–89); the second phase, lasting through 1897, during which time Shuntō’s
son Mori Kainan (1863–1911) was in ascendance; and the third phase, a period of
decline that came shortly after Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War.2
The poets who dominated the first dozen years of Meiji kanshi had largely
made names for themselves prior to the Restoration. Ōnuma Chinzan had
demonstrated his precocious talents by publishing his first poetry volume in
1838 and by the mid 1850s, he was clearly the central figure in Edo kanshi circles.
Dwelling among other literarily inclined individuals in the Shitaya district,
Chinzan was able to support himself as a professional poet, earning fees for his
teaching and evaluation of students’ manuscripts, as well as for his own
compositions. As head of the Shitaya Ginsha poetry group, Chinzan had
consistently eschewed official service, meaning that his activities as poetic
mentor, anthology editor, and commentator continued more or less
unchanged through the Restoration. Yet Chinzan’s remove did not mean he
was unresponsive to the transformations he saw around him. His somewhat
satirical Tōkeishi (Tokyo Poems), published just one year after the Restoration
(and promptly banned), was one of the first kanshi collections to survey the
culture of the new capital. In the following quatrain, Chinzan draws upon
ancient diction interpreting the first two hexagrams of The Classic of Changes
(representing pure yang and pure yin) to describe present-day couture:

The whole world in barbarian garb; stalwarts’ aims shifted now;

Only wrestlers and courtesans dress as they always have.

1
Iritani Sensuke, Kindai bungaku to shite no Meiji kanshi (Tokyo: Kenbun Shuppan, 1989).
2
Miura Kanō, Meiji kanbungakushi (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 1998); Meiji no Kangaku (Tokyo:
Kyūko Shoin, 1998).

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From this we know: it is the sturdiest and the most pliant that
Embody the ultimate virtues of “fitness” and “constancy.”

While many poetry societies operated in early Meiji Tokyo, it was the Matsuri
Ginsha, established by Mori Shuntō in 1874, that became the chief rival of
Chinzan’s Shitaya Ginsha. Both Chinzan and Shuntō had studied kanshi under
Yanagawa Seigan in their youth, but Nagoya was Shuntō’s primary base during
the late Edo period. Upon his relocation to Tokyo in 1874, Shuntō embarked
upon an ambitious publishing agenda that quickly brought him national
recognition. Just one year after his arrival, he published Tōkyō saijin zekku
(Quatrains by Tokyo’s Men of Talent), a two-volume anthology that enjoyed
longstanding popularity. Containing compositions by more than 160 poets
(beginning with Chinzan), the collection exemplifies several particularly
Meiji features, such as sequences composed by poets during excursions abroad
(to China, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States), as well as the appended
contribution of Ye Songshi, a Qing literatus who had arrived in Tokyo to teach
Chinese only the previous year. In contrast to Chinzan, Shuntō actively
cultivated ties with Meiji statesmen, who made up a significant number of
the contributors to the kanshi collections he published.
In addition to such anthologies, periodical media was another important
vehicle for the popularization of kanshi in early Meiji. Literary magazines
that were devoted to or featured kanshi prominently proliferated during
these years: notably Shuntō’s Shinbunshi (1875–81); Narushima Ryūhoku’s
Kagetsu shinshi (1877–84); and Sada Hakubō’s Meiji shibun (1876–80). Even
before these magazines emerged, however, the modes of poetic composi-
tion and communication that they would come to encourage had been
pioneered in the pages of daily newspapers, Ryūhoku’s Chōya shinbun fore-
most among them.
Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–84) embarked upon a career as a journalist
after losing his post in the Restoration. He had served the previous regime
as shogunal tutor and compiler of historical chronicles while also making a
name for himself as a poet and chronicler of urban culture. The two
volumes of his New Chronicles of Yanagibashi (1859–71, published 1874) docu-
ment the distinctive customs of the Yanagibashi geisha district before and
after the Restoration. Following in the tradition of Terakado Seiken (1796–
1868), Ryūhoku used hybridized kanbun to humorously satirize changing
customs and mores: a style that Hattori Bushō (1842–1908) would also adopt
in Tōkyō shinhanjōki (A New Record of Flourishing Tokyo, 1874–6), one of
the early Meiji period’s best-selling books. Though the Meiji regime

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attempted to suppress the publication of both texts, these works were

nevertheless popular not only at the time of their publication but among
readers and writers of the next generation; as Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) would
later recall, “there wasn’t a student around in Meiji who was unfamiliar
with Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles.”
From the beginning of his ten years overseeing the Chōya shinbun,
Ryūhoku made kanshibun an important regular feature of the newspaper.
Timely compositions by established poets appeared in almost every issue,
often accompanied by the commentary, critique, or poetic replies of other
well-known figures. Readers of the paper from all regions of Japan took part
as well, submitting their recent compositions for evaluation or offering their
own harmonizing responses to poems they had read in its pages. The Kagetsu
shinshi magazine that Ryūhoku launched a few years later expanded this
interactive literary mode to include a diverse array of kanshi and other poetry
as well as translations, travelogues, and essays (in both kanbun and classical
Japanese). The multiple references to Kagetsu shinshi in the novels of Mori
Ōgai (1862–1922) indicate how popular the kanshi and kanbun works printed
in such magazines were among those who would become the eminent
writers of the next generation.
One other significant readership for Japanese kanshibun that emerged in
early Meiji was Chinese, and cognizance of this new audience manifested
itself in various ways. While the fruit of Japanese kanshi poets’ exchanges
with Qing literati who traveled to or worked in Japan had appeared spor-
adically in the pages of Japan’s newspapers and magazines in the mid 1870s,
the 1878 establishment of the first Chinese embassy in Tokyo made such
opportunities much more common. Traditionally educated Japanese shared
a common written language with the Qing officials and regularly engaged
them in poetry exchanges and wide-ranging “brush-talks”; these were reg-
ularly featured in periodical media and also published as monographs. So
eager were Japanese poets to seek out critiques of their kanshi or to solicit
kanbun prefaces to their poetic anthologies that the Qing embassy even
explicitly assigned staff members the responsibility of coordinating such
interaction. The Qing officials likewise availed themselves of the abundance
of kanbun and kanshi texts circulating in early Meiji Japan to produce a
diverse range of works systematically introducing Japanese culture and
society to a Chinese audience. Even Qing scholars unaffiliated with the
embassy drew upon published texts to produce some of the earliest
Chinese anthologies of Japanese kanshi, such as Chen Manshou’s 1883 Riben
tongren shixuan (A Selection of Poems by Japanese Comrades), and Yu Yue’s

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massive Dongying shixuan (A Selection of Poems from Japan), which followed

shortly thereafter.
The figure who was central to the second stage of Meiji kanshi, Mori
Kainan, reflected this increased level of interaction with Qing poets. In his
childhood, Kainan had the rare opportunity to study poetry composition and
spoken Chinese with a native speaker, and his poetic tastes were likewise
informed by more recent trends. While Qing dynasty poems had received
some attention from earlier Japanese figures, both Kainan and his father
Shuntō produced anthologies that made Qing poems more familiar and
accessible. Kainan was particularly known for his ornate style and romantic
themes, a tendency that was already apparent in some of the poems he
published in Kagetsu shinshi as a young man.
The approach of Kokubu Seigai (1857–1944), who came to rival Kainan’s
prominence during this second stage, could not have been more dissimilar.
Though he emerged from Kainan’s Seisha poetic group, Seigai took his
inspiration from the poetry of earlier dynasties, the bold and sweeping style
he favored contrasting with Kainan’s delicacy. Kanshi figured prominently in
the political novels that emerged in the mid-1880s and 1890s, which were
written in a style of Japanese derived from kanbun, and Seigai is said to have
been the author of the kanshi woven into Shiba Shirō’s (pen-name: Tōkai
Sanshi) tremendously popular novel Kajin no kigū (Chance Meetings with
Beautiful Women, 1885–8, 1891, 1897). Seigai was best known, however, for
the topical poems he began publishing regularly in newspapers and maga-
zines of the 1890s, many of which provided critical commentary on current
events. As Gōyama Rintarō has observed, this genre of topical kanshi was
arguably the most widely read in the Meiji period, with Seigai’s success
leading Noguchi Neisai (1867–1905) and others to produce kanshi columns
in major media that were critically responsive to recent political and cultural
developments. The journalist and critic Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969)
fondly recalled how Seigai’s kanshi could often be seen scrawled on the
classroom blackboards of his student days in the 1890s.
In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, kanshi became a less
prominent feature of the literary scene. Whereas kanshi columns were
common in major national and regional newspapers through mid-Meiji,
these began to disappear by the Taishō era (1912–26), though a range of
magazines continued to feature kanshi regularly through the 1940s, and even
today a small handful of journals maintain the practice. Those educated in the
first decades of Meiji, including such literary giants as Natsume Sōseki (1867–
1916), continued to compose kanshi well into the twentieth century, but

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altered educational priorities meant that the population of kanshi producers

rapidly dwindled. While basic literacy in Literary Sinitic remained part of the
curriculum for those coming of age in the early twentieth century, the
technical training necessary to compose kanshi increasingly became some-
thing acquired only through independent initiative. A greater emphasis upon
acquiring Western languages was unquestionably one factor leading to the
demise of kanshi, but to understand this shift in terms of a simple antithetical
tension between Chinese and Western discourse risks obscuring the ways in
which Literary Sinitic had served as a major vehicle by which Meiji intellec-
tuals encountered and translated Western ideas.3

3
Several informative works on Sinitic literature in Meiji include: Kanda Kiichirō, ed. Meiji
bungaku zenshū, vol. 62, Meiji kanshibunshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1983); Kinoshita
Hyō, Meiji shiwa (Tokyo: Bunchūdō, 1943); Saitō Mareshi, Kanbunmyaku no kindai:
Shinmatsu Meiji no bungakuken (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005);
Kanbunmyaku to kindai Nihon: Mō hitotsu no kotoba no sekai (Tokyo: NHK Books, 2007);
Gōyama Rintarō, Bakumatsu, Meijiki no kanbungaku no kenkyū (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2014).

577
 58
Translated fiction, political fiction
dennis washburn

Meiji Japan may be described, in both instrumental and metaphorical senses,

as a translation culture. Almost all of the oligarchy’s policies aimed at
modernizing the state were dependent to some degree on the translation of
Western political, legal, and technological knowledge. At the time of the
Meiji Restoration, a number of leading writers and intellectuals held the
position that the best way to foreclose the possibility of cultural cooption was
to adapt Enlightenment ideals as a way to encourage a new moral conscious-
ness. One prominent exponent of this view was Nakamura Masanao (1832–91,
literary sobriquet Keiu), a Confucian scholar and educator whose best-selling
translations of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859; Saigoku risshi-hen, 1871) and
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859; Jiyū no kotowari, 1872) helped popularize
the modern myths of the self-made man and the positivist views of individual
initiative, rationalism, and autonomy. Such popular translations not only
helped garner support for the aims of modernization by supplying informa-
tion about the West, but also acted in concert with other developments to
stimulate the creation of a market for literary translations. In particular, the
institution in 1872 of universal compulsory education to grade four, coupled
with the emergence of a commercially viable press during the 1870s, created a
larger readership with an emerging consciousness of national identity.
If early Meiji literature is distinguished by the ideologically motivated
translations of the modernizers, it is equally marked by a change in the status
of gesaku (“playful fiction”) writers, who re-imagined themselves in a new
social role as a bastion of culturally essential values. The works of Kanagaki
Robun (1829–94) exemplify this trend. Robun was a journalist who specia-
lized in humorous accounts of the follies accompanying the introduction of
Western customs. His most notable works include Seiyōdōchū hizakurige
(Shank’s Mare to the West, serialized 1870–6), a reworking of the Edo fiction
writer Jippensha Ikku’s Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare on the Tōkaidō,
serialized 1802–22) that transports the pratfalls and slapstick adventures of

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Ikku’s peripatetic characters Yaji and Kita to a global stage. Robun’s sharpest
and most topical satire, however, is aimed at the domestic scene. Works such
as Agura nabe (Sitting around the Stewpot, 1871–2), in which the fad of eating
beef stands in for the age of civilization and enlightenment, skewer the foibles
and pretensions of the modernizers.
Though late gesaku writers enjoyed some degree of commercial success
with their satiric writings, their oppositional stance was already an indication
that significant changes in manners and customs were under way and could
not be stopped. When the Ministry of Religious Instruction mandated in its
1872 guidelines for writers that fiction had to serve the interests of the state,
the basic conception of the social value of literature began to be prescribed so
that even gesaku, with its supposedly frivolous attitude, had to assume a
more serious role. It was politically advantageous for modernizers to dis-
parage the Tokugawa period as frivolous and backward, and even conserva-
tive intellectuals saw popular forms of pre-Meiji literature and storytelling as
increasingly old-fashioned. Still, although gesaku came to be identified with a
passing age, the practices and values of late Tokugawa fiction remained
popular throughout the nineteenth century. Robun, for example, had a
major success in 1879 with his gesaku-style work Takahashi Oden yasha
monogatari (Tale of the Demon Takahashi Oden), which was based on a
notorious murder case of 1876. Takabatake Ransen (1838–85) also turned to
more contemporary settings and stories, as in his Chōtori Tsukuba no suso moyō
(A Pattern of Butterflies and Birds at the base of Mount Tsukuba, 1883–4), in
order to keep the practices and techniques of gesaku up to date.
As it turns out, the durability of literary modes inherited from the
Tokugawa period in the face of fundamental changes in language, publishing
formats, and modes of circulation was a crucial condition for the boom in
translations. The study of Chinese texts and the work of Nagasaki inter-
preters, especially those who created the scholarly specialization of Dutch
Studies, or Rangaku, laid much of the linguistic groundwork that was
exploited in the new economy of print media. Meiji translators did not
have to rely exclusively on neologisms for their work, since they could
draw on terms from earlier Rangaku translations, from late Tokugawa period
translations by scholars of Chinese, and from classical Chinese vocabulary. In
addition, the well-established literary practice of adapted fiction, hon’an
shōsetsu, provided a model for localizing foreign texts.
The models provided by Rangaku scholars and the practice of adaptation,
hon’an, is reflected in the work of early Meiji translators, who tended to rely
on elements of classical rhetoric already accessible to readers familiar with

579
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the conventions of kanbuntai (classical Chinese style), a concise Sinitic style of

writing. They also drew upon the hybrid practice known as kanbun kundo-
kutai, reading classical Chinese in Japanese syntactic order. There were
important exceptions, such as Nakamura Keiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi
(1834–1901) who tried to write and translate colloquially for a mass audience,
but for the most part early Meiji translators used the hybrid styles in all types
of translations, including literary works, until the mid 1880s, when a new
generation of translators better trained in Western languages began their
experiments to create new vernacular styles, known as genbun-itchi (unifica-
tion of spoken and written languages) style, which ultimately led to a
standard form of modern written Japanese.
Like items of vocabulary and style, the general principles of translation
owe debts both to Tokugawa stylistics and to the changed worldview that
made translation such a vital activity. This is illustrated by the ideas of Morita
Shiken (1861–97), who had called for a more thorough classification of all
scholarly activities in Eastern culture as a way to emulate the rationalistic,
scientific West. This prescriptive tendency is apparent in Morita’s “Rules for
Translation” (Hon’yaku no kokoroe), which appeared in the newly established
journal Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend) in 1887. For Morita, the ideal
translation transparently re-creates Japanese as an international language,
and so he urges the abandonment of the customary reliance on ornamental
terms from classical Chinese in favor of a more literal shift to modern
Western idioms. The method of reading classical Chinese as Japanese had a
long history, but no such tradition apart from the relatively recent emergence
of Rangaku existed for working with Western languages. Moreover, the
belief that fiction was a frivolous pursuit lingered among some translators
who were interested in Western literatures. Given this history, it was difficult
even for modernizers to reconcile completely their misgivings with the
prestige accorded literature, especially the novel, in the West.
These considerations were certainly crucial to Oda Jun’ichirō (1851–1919,
pen-name Niwa Jun’ichirō), whose abridged translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s
novels Ernest Maltrevers and Alice was published in 1878 under the title Karyū
shunwa (A Romance – literally “spring tale” – of Cherries and Willows). Like
many early Meiji translations, Karyū shunwa is not a direct or literal reworking
of the original, but a Tokugawa-style adaptation.
This translation has been accorded an important place in the history of
modern literature in Japan because of the reasons behind Oda’s choice.
Bulwer-Lytton’s novels were popular in England at the time Oda traveled
and studied there, and he understood their appeal. Ernest Maltrevers and Alice

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are pastiches of melodrama and romanticism. Their sentimental, often sen-

sationalist, plots gesture toward more traditional, “respectable” values, while
their protagonists reflect the Byronic ideal of the autonomous, self-made
hero. For Oda, the hybrid quality of these novels seemed especially appealing
because they possessed familiar melodramatic narrative elements while deal-
ing with social and political issues. In a brief postscript to his translation he
compared Bulwer-Lytton’s works to late Tokugawa romances such as
Shunshoku umegoyomi (Plum Calendar of Spring Colors, 1832–3) by
Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1844). Even so, he conceived of his readership not
as mere consumers of gesaku, but as educated, enlightened men. His purpose
was to inform his readers about conditions in the West, and to that end he
employed a modified Sinitic style.
The significance of works like Karyū shunwa in the development of rhetoric
and style is harder to discern now because fundamental changes, driven in
large part by more sophisticated translations, occurred over the course of the
1880s. Nevertheless, Karyū shunwa marked an important historical turn
because it made a strong appeal about the value of fiction. At almost the
same time that translations of fiction began to appear in greater numbers,
conflicting views about the value and social role of narrative fiction reached a
brief convergence with the appearance of a new genre, the political novel, or
seiji shōsetsu.
Seiji shōsetsu, a term that typifies the hybrid nature of early Meiji forms,
refers to a group of novels written for the most part during the 1880s. Many of
the authors of this genre – Komuro Angaidō (1852–85), Miyazaki Muryū (1853–
89), and Sakazaki Shiran (1853–1913) – were journalists or political activists
involved in the People’s Rights movement, which pursued the creation of a
popularly elected assembly, the institution of civil rights, and the promulga-
tion of a constitution. These men shared Oda’s belief that novels could be
used to enlighten, though their target audience was the uneducated masses
who needed instruction in modern ideas of freedom and rights. They enjoyed
popular success because their works employed romantic figures and histor-
ical settings ranging from Restoration era Japan to the French Revolution.
The most commercially successful author of seiji shōsetsu was Yano
Ryūkei (1850–1931), who published his Keikoku bidan (Commendable
Anecdotes on Creating a Nation) in 1883–4. This novel details the fall of
ancient Thebes, a subject that, because it was so removed from current
events, helped protect the liberalizing sentiments of the novel from govern-
ment censorship. Yano aimed his work at a market of more highly educated
readers, which helped make fiction seem socially acceptable, and his success

581
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inspired Tsubouchi Shōyō to translate Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby and

Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi in 1885. It also encouraged other writers to try their
hand at infusing political ideology into fiction.
The hybridity of the political novel is apparent in two of the most popular
and influential works: Setchūbai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886) by
Suehiro Tetchō (1849–96), which is marked by the intrusions of political
dialogues into a love-romance narrative; and Kajin no kigū (Chance
Meetings with Beautiful Women, 1885–8, 1891, 1897) by Shiba Shirō (1852–
1922, pen-name Tōkai Sanshi), a romance centered around stories about the
struggle for freedom and national independence in contemporary Asia,
Africa, and Europe. The protagonist Tōkai Sanjin (“Wanderer from the
Eastern Seas”) lives in Philadelphia, where he meets several beautiful
women: Yūran, an advocate for constitutional monarchy in Spain; Kōren,
who opposes British rule in Ireland; and their butler, who is an exiled rebel
against Manchu rule in China. Sanjin visits many countries fighting against
European colonial power and eventually joins with a Japanese group plotting
to overthrow the Yi dynasty and claim Korea for Japan.
These political novels largely replicated certain stylistic tendencies of
gesaku. The authors of Tokugawa adaptations of Ming fiction constituted a
literary elite who made use of vernacular language and popular literary
conventions within a framework provided by the classical Chinese idiom of
their education. In that sense, the political novel was as much in the tradition
of the Tokugawa practice of hon’an, adaptation, as Karyū shunwa, and it
played the same crucial role as translation literature in introducing new
idioms and worldviews and promoting new patterns of literary production
and consumption.
By 1882, many large-circulation daily newspapers had sprung up in the
major cities, a significant number of regional and specialized publications
were founded, and a majority of publishing ventures had switched from
woodblock to movable-type printing, reducing costs and improving the
efficiency of distribution. Readership expanded in both geographical and
socio-economic terms, and mass literacy gradually changed reading habits
as well, which shifted away from communal and oral practices toward the
norm of silent reading by individuals. Viewed within the context of these
enormous material transformations, perhaps the most important achieve-
ment of translations and political fiction was in taking advantage of new
media to establish the novel as the artistic medium of modern culture that
best represented the aspirations and sensibilities of an emerging middle-class
readership.

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Newspaper serials in the late nineteenth
century
satoru saito

Although it had various precedents in the Edo period, the newspaper as a daily
collection of news first established itself as a major medium in the early Meiji
period, within the larger Westernization movement called bunmei kaika (civi-
lization and enlightenment) that led to Japan’s increased contact with other
countries and its entry into the world economy. Japan’s first daily newspaper,
Yokohama mainichi shinbun (Yokohama Daily), was founded on December 8,
Meiji 3 (January 28, 1871 under the Gregorian calender), and soon others such as
Tokyo nichinichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily, est. 1872) and Yūbin hōchi shinbun (Post-
Dispatch Newspaper, est. 1872) followed suit. These newspapers were charac-
terized by their kanbun-style language and their focus on economy and business
that matched their target audience of entrepreneurs and intellectuals. At the
same time, they contained columns devoted to strange events, both domestic
and foreign, that appealed to their readers’ curiosity, a curiosity that would fuel
the spread of the newspaper medium.
The newspaper began to expand its scope in the course of the 1870s, when
papers such as Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper, est. 1874), Hiragana e’iri
shinbun (Hiragana Illustrated Newspaper, est. 1875; soon renamed Tokyo e’iri
shinbun, or Tokyo Illustrated News), and Kanayomi shinbun (Kanayomi
Newspaper, est. 1875) targeted a more general audience including women
and children. Characterized by their focus on everyday topics and their use of
colloquial language, these newspapers differentiated themselves physically
by using smaller-sized paper; and they soon came to be known as koshinbun
(small newspapers), in contrast with the more serious ōshinbun (large news-
papers) described above.
Another feature of the koshinbun that set them apart from the ōshinbun
was the prominence of a column called zappō (miscellaneous reports), in
which one can discern the literary tropes of Meiji narrative fiction beginning
to take shape. A combination of tabloid news and neighborhood gossip, these
columns covered a variety of topics such as local crime, adultery, the pleasure

583
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quarters, and even domestic quarrels. To the extent that they targeted not
only public figures but also ordinary people, often exposing embarrassing
details, the zappō columns were a double-edged sword: readers were enter-
tained but also feared becoming their victims. Through these columns, the
newspaper, while playing a kind of didactic function of kanzen chōaku (prais-
ing virtue, chastising vice), fostered a readership whose enjoyment was
intricately tied to the exposure of private lives.
Soon, the newspapers began to serialize the reports appearing in these
columns, and this resulted in the reports becoming more story-like and
crossing into the realm of fiction. By the end of the 1870s, these serialized
“reports” called tsuzuki-mono had established themselves as the favorite read-
ing material of newspaper subscribers, stimulating the sales of koshinbun at a
time when the newspaper industry as a whole was undergoing rapid expan-
sion due to two contemporary developments: the Seinan War (1877), trig-
gered by the rebellion of the Meiji Restoration hero Saigō Takamori (1828–
77), and the Jiyū minken undō (Freedom and People’s Rights movement). This
movement (thought to have begun when Itagaki Taisuke [1837–1919], among
others, submitted a call for a representative form of government in 1874)
gained momentum in the late 1870s, fueling the transformation of the news-
paper industry.
Defined by its serialized form, the tsuzuki-mono varied widely in its
subject matter, ranging from “Kinnosuke no hanashi” (The Story of
Kinnosuke, serialized in Tokyo e’iri shinbun from August to September
1878), a story about a merchant who has fallen on hard times after becoming
involved with a geisha, to narratives that would become known as dokufu-
mono (poisonous women tales), which focused on real women criminals. The
most famous of the dokufu-mono was the story of Takahashi Oden (1850–79),
which first appeared as a tsuzuki-mono in multiple newspapers the day after
her execution for robbery and murder on January 31, 1879.
As popular as they were, tsuzuki-mono elicited a mixed response from the
newspapers. Yomiuri shinbun made a concerted effort to maintain its ethical
position by doing without tsuzuki-mono, believing that the format of a report
based on facts but embellished with fiction undermined the role of the
newspapers as purveyors of news as truth. In an attempt to maintain its
respectability, the Yomiuri established Yomiuri zōtan (Yomiuri Miscellany), a
column comparable to the editorial columns of ōshinbun. By contrast, Tokyo
e’iri shinbun frequently illustrated the tsuzuki-mono to entertain its readers,
while maintaining a semblance of factual news by employing the figure of the
reporter as narrator who presents the story as an investigative report.

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 Newspaper serials in the late nineteenth century

Kanayomi shinbun, founded by popular author Kanagaki Robun (1829–94),

while not employing illustrations at this time, utilized tsuzuki-mono as a kind
of advertisement for an illustrated book version that would follow if the story
generated enough interest. For example, Robun’s “Torioi Omatsu no den”
(The Story of Actress Omatsu), often regarded as the first tsuzuki-mono, began
serialization on December 10, 1877, but the story was discontinued on January
11, 1878 with an announcement that the story would continue in book form.
The story of Takahashi Oden followed a similar path, as Robun curtailed the
serialization to publish the story in book form as Takahashi Oden yasha mono-
gatari (Tale of the Demon Takahashi Oden, 1879). These books, called jitsuroku
shōsetsu (sensational stories produced by mixing facts and fiction), enabled
writers such as Robun to free themselves up from the constraints of news
reporting and to embellish facts for the entertainment of the readers.
By the early 1880s, however, ambivalence toward the genre began to
dissipate, and the tsuzuki-mono became the centerpiece of many newspa-
pers. Added to the mix of serialized narratives in the newspapers were
translations of Western stories as well as the political novels, a distinct literary
genre of the Meiji period that was used as a vehicle to spread the ideals of the
Freedom and People’s Rights movement. Often read in an allegorical manner
in which characters and stories were understood as representing actual
people or events, the political novels, appearing in both the ōshinbun and
the koshinbun, challenged not only the supposed factual basis of tsuzuki-
mono but also the presumed role of fiction as entertainment for women and
children. The popularity of the tsuzuki-mono was such that even the Yomiuri,
which had long resisted carrying tsuzuki-mono, was finally forced to relent in
early 1885. But the Yomiuri was quick to find a solution that would enable it to
carry entertainment while reestablishing its respectability as a provider of
news as truth. Heeding the advice of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), an
important contributor to the paper who had just published the first install-
ment of his Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885–6), the Yomiuri
established an independent shōsetsu-ran (fiction column) in January 1886 in an
effort to draw a clear distinction between news and fiction and to clarify the
fictional nature of newspaper serials. In addition to being used by Shōyō for
his literary experiments in the late 1880s, this column provided a forum, in the
late 1880s and early 1890s, for other major authors of modern Japanese
literature such as Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), and
Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903).
Shōyō and the Yomiuri also took the lead in experimenting with a literary
genre that would quickly become the next dominant genre in newspaper

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serials, namely, detective fiction. In December 1887, at a time when this genre
had not established itself in Japan, Shōyō translated and serialized the
American detective story XYZ by Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), which
appeared as “Nisegane tsukai” (The Counterfeiter) in the supplementary
issues of Yomiuri shinbun. In January 1888, the journalist Kuroiwa Ruikō
(1862–1920) quickly followed suit with his newspaper serialization of “Hōtei
no bijin” (A Beauty in Court), a translation of the American writer Hugh
Conway’s Dark Days. Over the course of the next five years, Ruikō would
serialize over twenty works, many of them by the French writers Émile
Gaboriau (1832–73) and Fortuné du Boisgobey (1821–91), generating a detec-
tive fiction boom in Meiji Japan.
The emergence of the detective story in the late 1880s appeared to be a
perfect marriage between content and form within the literary landscape of
the time. Parasitic rather than groundbreaking, Ruikō’s stories drew heavily
on the genres that took an interest in secrets, crime, law, and foreign
countries. At the same time, Ruikō made sure to fully utilize the format of
the newspaper serial, whether ending each installment in a manner that
created suspense or holding a whodunit contest in which readers were
invited to guess the culprit.
The overwhelmingly positive reception of Ruikō’s detective stories in the
late 1880s was surprising nonetheless, considering that the tantei (detective)
had quickly become a hated figure upon its introduction as a government
position in 1881 and that it had been vilified in various political novels of the
1880s. Many of Ruikō’s detective stories were serialized in E’iri jiyū shinbun
(Illustrated Liberal Newspaper, est. 1882), where he was the editor-in-chief
and where many political novels had been serialized in an effort to impress on
readers the injustices of the Meiji government and its detectives. In this sense,
Ruikō’s stories were a part of a radical shift that took place in the late 1880s, a
political lame duck period when the Freedom and People’s Rights movement
waned and people awaited the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889 and
the opening of the Diet in 1890, the two primary achievements of the move-
ment. In this time of transition, Ruikō’s detective stories guided the politically
minded public through a literary genre that turned unjust crimes into
entertaining puzzles for the detective and readers alike.
Despite the overwhelming success of Ruikō’s translations, detective fic-
tion’s reign as the dominant genre of newspaper serials was short-lived,
sputtering out after Ruikō abandoned the genre in the early 1890s.
Detective fiction would exercise a profound effect on Japanese literary con-
sciousness for decades to come, as exemplified by Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916)

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who remained preoccupied with the genre throughout his literary career. But
as far as serialized fiction was concerned, the newspapers would soon find a
suitable replacement in the katei shōsetsu (family novels) that proliferated in
the late 1890s in the hands of such authors as Ozaki Kōyō and Kikuchi Yūhō
(1870–1947) as well as Ruikō himself, all of whom translated, adapted, or were
heavily influenced by the works of Bertha M. Clay. While the singularity of
their source might be surprising, the subject matter of Clay’s works – the
ethical importance of marriage and fidelity, especially for women – makes
sense given the emphatic connection between serialized fiction and its milieu
since the late 1890s was a period when major ideological frameworks of the
Japanese family were being constructed and propagated in conjunction with
the Meiji Civil Code (1896–98).

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Translation, vernacular style, and the
Westernesque femme fatale in modern
Japanese literature
indra levy

The history of modern Japanese literature begins with translation in more

than one sense. First, the nineteenth-century European concept of “litera-
ture” was translated into the Chinese compound bungaku, investing an old
word with a new meaning. The institution of this new concept precipitated a
watershed in the social history of fiction, raising it from the lowly status of
frivolous entertainment to the high culture of civilized nations. Second, the
Meiji period ushered in an era of literary translations from Western languages
that would have a decisive impact on Japanese literary production.
Translating Western literary texts played an essential role in the creation of
a new literary language for modern Japanese fiction. Using Futabatei Shimei
(1864–1909) as a case study, this entry explores the underlying relationship
between literary translation, vernacular composition, and the emergence of a
new gender archetype for modern Japanese literature.
The Meiji era (1868–1912) was characterized by calls for reform in virtually
every arena of Japanese life; language and women were especially prominent
targets for change. With respect to language, reformers advocated bringing
writing into conformity with spoken language, following the model of
modern Western vernacular literature. With respect to women, reformers
promoted the adoption of Western fashions, hairstyles, and, most impor-
tantly, education. The unprecedented figure of the schoolgirl would come to
personify the rapidly changing face of Meiji Japan. These calls for reform
constitute the essential background for Futabatei’s dual career as literary
translator and novelist, as the discussion below will demonstrate.
Futabatei Shimei is widely hailed as the progenitor of Japanese literary
modernity, a distinction that derives primarily from his creation of the
genbun-itchi (unification of spoken and written languages) vernacular style
that would later become the very foundation of the modern Japanese novel.

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He was the first to attempt translating modern Western fiction into verna-
cular Japanese, and one of the first to try composing original fiction in
vernacular Japanese. Significantly, his earliest efforts at literary translation
predate his work as a novelist. By 1886, he had translated a work by Nikolai
Gogol (title unknown), and by March of the same year he had translated part
of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Although these translations were never
published and their manuscripts have been lost to history, Tsubouchi Shōyō’s
(1859–1935) recollections tell us that both were written in a vernacular style.
Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds) was published in installments from July 1887
through August 1889. In the meantime, Futabatei also debuted as a literary
translator with the serialized publication of Aibiki (Turgenev’s “The
Rendezvous,” from A Sportsman’s Notebook). As this chronology suggests,
Futabatei’s creation of a vernacular Japanese literary language was inextric-
ably tied to the process of translation.
Although we habitually think of translation as a transference between two
discrete and established languages, Futabatei used translation to create a new
literary language in Japanese. In this sense, his translations from modern
Russian literature constitute original innovations. Indeed, the form of literature
presented by Futabatei’s Aibiki and Ukigumo was so new as to ultimately create
a radical divide between modern Japanese fiction and all that preceded it.
Prior to Futabatei’s work, the styles available to Japanese literary transla-
tors derived from two local traditions: classical Japanese prose (wabun or
gabun) and Japanese reading conventions for literary Chinese (kanbun-kun-
doku). The latter quickly emerged as the preferred medium for translation (as
in Niwa Jun’ichirō’s 1877 translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers,
mentioned in the previous chapter). The preference for the kanbun-kundoku
style in the translation of Western literatures is related to the fact that it
derived from techniques for rendering classical Chinese into Japanized pro-
nunciations and syntactical patterns. Kanbun-kundoku style was thus an
interlingual écriture par excellence, and it was already quite familiar to the
educated classes of 1870s and 1880s Japan. Yet as a medium of translation, its
potential to transform the Western novel was substantially limited to the
sphere of narrative content. What kanbun-kundoku translations offered
Japanese readers was a compelling story and a more intimate sense, however
fictional, of the daily lives and sensibilities of Westerners.
In translating vernacular Russian fiction, Futabatei abandoned the preex-
isting styles of kanbun-kundoku, instead seeking to forge a new style that
would convey the form, content, and vernacular nature of the original texts.
This was not a simple matter of writing Japanese as it was actually spoken.

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Japanese precedents for rendering colloquial speech in writing included

Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), a writer of popular Edo fiction, and San’yūtei
Enchō (1839–1900), a raconteur whose performance was captured verbatim
by a new, Western-inspired shorthand technique in the Meiji era publication
of Kaidan Botan dōrō (A Ghost Story Peony Lantern, 1886). With respect to the
representation of dialogue, Sanba had already achieved vernacular realism
with orthographic innovations that indicated dialectal idiosyncrasies in pro-
nunciation. Yet use of the vernacular was limited to dialogue, with the
narrative passages written exclusively in the gabun style. If the vernaculariza-
tion of Japanese writing were simply a matter of replicating speech, as so
many of its proponents claimed, then the publication of Botan dōrō would
have represented the completion of, rather than a suggestive prelude to, the
development of this style.
However, Futabatei’s pioneering interest in vernacular literature was not
inspired by these Japanese precedents, but rather by his encounter with
modern Russian literature. His effort to develop a new literary style was
driven by his devotion to a new conception of literature itself. Though the
effect of his work was not immediate, in the long run it proved to be the most
incontrovertible: when subsequent Japanese Naturalists such as Tayama
Katai (1872–1930) retrospectively refer to the kanbun-kundoku style fiction
they read as youths in the 1880s, it is almost always as a trope for their as yet
immature conception of literature; by contrast, their glowing recollections of
Aibiki invariably narrate their awakening to literature proper (bungaku in the
modern sense of the term).
As a translator, Futabatei is renowned for his adherence to the form of the
original text. In a frequently cited interview (“Yo ga hon’yaku no hyōjun”
[My Standard for Translation], 1906), he stated that as a translator he “never
disposed of a single comma or period arbitrarily,” and even attempted to
reproduce “the same number of words as the original.” At a time when other
literary translators had few inhibitions about altering the content of the
translated text and none whatsoever about altering its formal characteristics,
Futabatei’s pious attitude toward the source text was original in itself. And it
was what both compelled and enabled him to create a new literary language
for Japanese.
Where Futabatei fundamentally departed from his predecessors and con-
temporaries in the production – translation or composition – of Meiji litera-
ture was in his understanding of literature. Simply stated, Futabatei was the
first Meiji writer to treat the novel with the respect customarily reserved for
the Chinese classics – ethical philosophy, history, Chinese poetry – that

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constituted the essential syllabus for elite education in pre-Meiji Japan. In

other words, he was one of the first in Japan to accord the novel the respect
normally reserved for the language of truth, as evidenced in his 1886 essay
“Shōsetsu sōron” (Theory of the Novel). Therein, Futabatei defined the
novel as a genre that borrows the contingent appearances of reality for
the sole purpose of revealing the idea (i.e. truth or meaning) hidden within.
The calculated use of language and plot are essential to achieving this aim.
Although the essay does not discuss literary translation, we can infer from its
logic that Futabatei’s goal as a translator was to convey the idea revealed by
the source novel, which was necessarily a product of both linguistic form and
narrative content. It was his understanding of the original text as an indivi-
sible unit of form and content that necessitated the creation of a new target
language.
If the genbun-itchi movement ostensibly aimed to close the gap between
colloquial speech and writing, it was fundamentally driven by a desire to
achieve parity between Japanese and modern European forms of writing.
What set Futabatei apart from contemporary rivals in the development of the
genbun-itchi style was not his superior ability to mimic spoken Japanese in
writing, but rather his genius for translating vernacular Russian literature into
elements from spoken Japanese diction. This decisive difference is easily
obscured if we consider genbun-itchi only as the realistic representation of
common parlance in prose, or rather, the representation of reality in prose via
the language of colloquial Japanese.
Frequently cited as a prime example of felicitous modern Japanese prose
style, Aibiki may appear to the modern-day reader as “natural” Japanese,
especially in comparison to the now-outmoded language of Niwa’s Karyū
shunwa or other examples from Futabatei’s day. However, when Aibiki first
appeared, Futabatei’s prose struck his contemporaries as anything but “nat-
ural.” One contemporary reviewer of Aibiki found its descriptive language so
cloying that he believed Futabatei must have embellished Turgenev’s
descriptions to make up for a dull plot. A comparison of Aibiki with the
original text shows that this was not the case. What was initially jarring about
Futabatei’s translation were elements that, when translated into English,
would not strike us as particularly odd. Here is an English translation of
the second sentence of Aibiki that retains the syntax and verbatim meaning of
Futabatei’s text as much as possible:
A light rain had been falling since the morning, and in the breaks between the
clouds a warm sun would shine now and then, truly fickle skies.

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In English, nothing seems “strange” about this passage. The personification

of nature in Western literatures, as old as Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn,” is
so familiar that we might not even notice that the expression “fickle skies”
invests a natural phenomenon with intentionality. However, this kind of
personification had virtually no place in the literary lexicons of classical
Japanese or Chinese, much less in the figures of everyday speech.
Futabatei must have been well aware that his translation would seem
“strange.” If he had wished to produce a “natural” version of Turgenev’s
story in Japanese, he could have reduced the personifying descriptions of
nature to a semantic content that could then be repackaged in a form already
available to Japanese writing. If he had done so, however, he would have
been left with precious little to translate. Not only was his method of
translation revolutionary; his choice of text was equally radical. Whereas
preceding translations of Western fiction reflected a primary interest in exotic
stories, Futabatei chose to translate a work that conveyed almost no story at
all. By manifesting a modern Western literary text in and as language,
Futabatei’s Aibiki definitively exposed the fact that his contemporaries in
the literary world apprehended modern Western literature as mere content.
Futabatei’s stringent personal standard for translation was driven by a
passionate belief in the ability of the vernacular novel to reveal the truth.
This same passion inspired Futabatei to write Ukigumo. The basic story of
Ukigumo is fairly simple: the protagonist, Utsumi Bunzō, is in love with his
cousin, Sonoda Osei. Her mother, Omasa, has hinted that she would support
their marriage. But when Bunzō loses his job, everyone begins to turn against
him. Omasa becomes increasingly hostile toward him and friendly toward
Honda Noboru, his former colleague in the prestigious government bureau-
cracy. In turn, Osei also seems to shift her affections from Bunzō to Noboru.
Things go from bad to worse, and by the end of the novel Bunzō is
completely alienated from his surroundings.
A natural born mimic, Osei has a distinct facility for picking up on new
trends, and an equal tendency to discard them as soon as something newer
comes along. Bunzō, by contrast, is characterized by an unswerving adher-
ence to ideals, making him incapable of adapting to his surroundings. While
Osei is a talker, Bunzō is a thinker who sees everything in terms of written
texts. The ever-widening gap between the two, when read as the failed
betrothal of speech and writing, emerges as a powerful metanarrative on
the essential dilemmas of vernacularization in modern Japanese literature.
The divide between Bunzō and the other main characters stems from a
conspicuous difference in their relationships to language. Bunzō is constantly

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hampered by his inability to manipulate spoken language: from the inability

to curry favor with his boss that results in his loss of employment to his
inability to verbally mollify Omasa; his frequent reduction to stuttering and
speechlessness in moments of highly charged emotion; and, most impor-
tantly, his inability to secure Osei’s affections in the face of competition from
the silver-tongued Noboru. By contrast, the other characters share an easy
facility with the spoken word. Omasa spins out words “with a will that could
turn even a heron into a crow,” and Noboru’s rise up the bureaucratic ladder
is fueled by “an inexhaustible wealth of eloquence” when it comes to
flattering the boss.
Bunzō’s late father, we are told, was a former retainer for the Bakufu – an
undesirable résumé in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. Pinning all of his
hopes on his son, he places such a complete emphasis on education that
Bunzō’s subjection to the written word becomes his most significant patri-
mony. The fundamental incompatibility between the malleable spoken
parlance of social commerce and the inflexible, letter-bound language of
ideas serves as the impetus for the entire narrative of Ukigumo, a novel
distinguished by the fact that almost all of its key events are verbal exchanges.
Osei is the enigmatic hybrid at the center of this class/language divide. Not
only is she presumably of mixed class, as the daughter of Omasa and Bunzō’s
paternal uncle, but her penchant for mimicry assimilates the written diction
of Chinese and English to her everyday speech. Indeed, the study of these
languages constitutes the core of her secondary education. The degree to
which Bunzō’s idealization of Osei hinges upon her use of language becomes
comically clear in the following passage. The two are home alone together,
and their conversation quickly turns to their relationship. When Osei inno-
cently declares that Bunzō is her newfound confidant, he responds with a
faltering attempt to confess his true feelings:

“. . . but I am utterly incapable of associating with you as a confidant.”

“Now what is that supposed to mean? Just why can’t you associate with me as a
confidant?”
“Why? Because I don’t understand you, and you also don’t understand me, so
associating as a confidant is, well . . .”
“Is that it? But I believe that I understand you very well. You are learned, your
conduct is exemplary, you treat your parents with filial piety . . .”
“That’s why I say that you don’t understand me. You say that I treat my parents
with filial piety, but I am not a good son. For me . . . there is something
more . . . important than parents . . .” stammered Bunzō, hanging his head.

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Osei stared at Bunzō with a puzzled look. “Something more important than
parents . . . something . . . more important . . . than parents . . . Oh, there is
also something more important to me than parents.”
Bunzō raised his hung head, “What? You too have that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Wh-who is it?”
“It’s not a person, it is Truth.”

Osei’s demonstration of fluency in Bunzō’s learned language generates the

comedy of their exchange. Bunzō has been tutoring Osei in English, a process
that includes lecturing her about abstract social and ethical questions. When
he suddenly blurts out that he is not a “good son,” Osei recasts his faltering
confession into the form of a test question, and then searches for a clever
answer: what could be more important than parents or filial piety? It must be
the new Western ideal of “truth.”

This word was a key component of many of the new thought systems coming
in from the West, such as Christianity, philosophy, and science. The estab-
lished Japanese translation, shinri, carries the weight of written language in a
way that is closer to the Latin veritas. It is certainly not a term used in casual
conversation. Osei never elaborates on what she means by “Truth.” In fact, the
issue of meaning has nothing to do with her use of the word here; it is simply a
clever way to keep up her end of a conversation that apparently strikes her as
highly intellectual. Her enunciation of an absolute value in modern Western
thought thus reduces the term to the status of an exotic verbal prop. This is the
constitutive difference between Osei and Bunzō. Osei is not subject to the
written word. While her language is quintessentially performative, however,
Bunzō reads it in the referential mode. To our literal-minded protagonist, the
word “truth” is strictly bound to the textual sources that give it meaning. Thus,
when Osei spouts out this word in place of the beloved’s name he was
expecting to hear, he sees a direct reflection of the speaker’s pristine self,
instead of his own image inadvertently parodied in her performance.
The language of Ukigumo directly reflects both the polyphony of hetero-
geneous class idioms and the complex polyglossia of Chinese, Western, and
Japanese letters that constituted the original impetus for and the essential
challenges to the vernacularization movement. Yet Futabatei’s first novel is
much more than a simple reflection of the polyphonic and polyglossic
conditions of his times. Within the battlefield of written and spoken language
– or foreign linguae francae and the native colloquial – what Osei personifies
is the bewitching appeal of a language that can alchemically compound all of

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these differences under the single sign of “Truth.” Osei is both Futabatei’s
dream and his nightmare. She spans the gap between writing and speech,
between foreign languages and Japanese, with no apparent effort. This was
precisely Futabatei’s goal as a vernacular writer. As both translator and
novelist, he attempted to create a language that would span all of these
gaps. Yet given his profound reverence for the Russian novel as a textually
fixed language of truth, he must have harbored deep-seated anxieties about
the elusive medium of spoken Japanese. Indeed, he must have been haunted
by the possibility that writing in the Japanese vernacular would have the
same effect as Osei’s pronouncement of “Truth” – a hollow ring that reduces
the truth of the modern novel to the status of mere talk.
If Ukigumo depicts a state of paralysis in Bunzō that can be traced to a
fundamentally irresolvable conflict between heterogeneous languages, then
it seems quite fitting that Futabatei himself – as the person who both sensed
and created this crisis in fiction – would meet the same fate as a novelist. By
the time he was writing the final section of his debut novel, Futabatei had
already begun to harbor serious doubts about literature as a vehicle of truth.
His doubts proved so consuming that Futabatei would not compose another
novel of his own until 1906, and he even abandoned literary translation for
almost an entire decade, until 1896. His disillusionment with the novel bears a
striking resemblance to Bunzō’s relationship with Osei. Just as Bunzō had
idolized Osei as a bearer of “Truth,” Futabatei had embraced the novel as that
which reveals the idea hidden within the contingent forms of appearance. Yet
in actual practice, Futabatei was confounded by the contingent forms of
language itself. Despite his clear advocacy of the vernacular novel, the
narrative of Ukigumo shows that Futabatei was deeply troubled by conflicting
forms and ideas of language. Language being the very medium of the novel,
his profound loss of confidence in the ability of fiction to represent truth
seems all but inevitable.
The next generation of radical vernacularists, the Naturalists, grew up with
a significantly different set of linguistic contingencies, among which the
language of Futabatei’s translations would come to occupy a position of
central importance. His translations clearly demonstrated the potential for
radical stylistic innovation. In an age when the vernacular style was becom-
ing the lingua franca of Japanese fiction, Tayama Katai called for a revamping
of the vernacular that would jettison its most writerly elements (“Rokotsu-
naru byōsha” [Raw Description], 1904). While his essay articulated an appar-
ently simplistic conception of the relationship between language and reality,
in practice his model was none other than Japanese literary translation. In

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Katai’s words, “the translation of Turgenev’s Aibiki – this too felt ineffably
new, intricate, free. I read it enough to memorize it. And it would be
impossible to say how much I used it as a reference in the writing of the
vernacular style.” His hope was to bring Japanese writing not simply closer to
“nature,” but also closer to his image of the Western model.
Katai’s epoch-making 1907 novella Futon (The Quilt) was a clear effort to
put into practice the ideals set forth in his essay. Yet despite his profession of
absolute faith in the technical ability, and even the moral and artistic neces-
sity, of the “raw” vernacular to represent “nature” (i.e. “truth”), he made his
name with a novel that, like Ukigumo, overlaid the pure image and promise of
this ideal language with the figure of a duplicitous Westernesque femme
fatale. Yoshiko, the main female character of Futon, is idolized by her mentor
as the embodiment of his stylistic ideals: she writes in a fluent, colloquial style
unfettered by conventional norms, and even her variety of facial expressions
seem to offer a transparent window into her soul. But in the end, her mentor
Tokio discovers that Yoshiko has merely manipulated these new techniques
of self-expression to dupe him into believing that she is a New Woman, pure
of mind and body, in the image of his favorite works of Western literature,
when in fact she has betrayed his trust by entering into a physical relationship
with a young man. After he discovers her duplicity, she hands him a written
apology in which she confesses, “I am a fallen schoolgirl . . . The duties of the
new Meiji woman Sensei taught me, I was not putting into practice. In the
end, I am still an old woman without the courage to put new ideas into
practice.” Yoshiko’s admission of guilt is articulated in a style that Katai had
already idealized as the best possible medium for conveying truth. In a
manner that harkens back to Futabatei’s Osei, this siren of transparent
language not only established the paradigm for Japanese Naturalist fiction,
but also marked many of its fundamental anxieties.
If we focus solely on the genre of fiction, the underlying contradictions of
Japanese Naturalism are easily obscured by the semblance of “vernacular
realism.” Yet on the Japanese stage, the Naturalist theater of Shimamura
Hōgetsu (1871–1918) gave rise to a new star and cultural icon – Matsui Sumako
(1886–1919) – whose renowned performances of the heroines of translated
European dramas reveal the underlying exoticism of the Naturalist project in
ways that are impossible to overlook.
Hōgetsu’s approach to theater reform mirrors Katai’s rejection of literary
artifice in the novel. Hōgetsu found the “element of exaggeration” in kabuki
aesthetically appalling, asserting that it should “obviously be replaced by
naturalistic facial expressions.” According to him, the aim of a modern

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Japanese theater should be the naturalistic representation of life on stage. But

Hōgetsu’s New Theater did not produce naturalistic stage performances of
the realities of Japanese life. Rather, he chose to launch his modernization of
the Japanese stage with the production of translated European dramas of the
female struggle for selfhood such as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and
Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat. In other words, he sought to reproduce the
purported realities of European life in modern European drama – a feat that,
for the Japanese actors and actresses called upon to perform his vision,
required a level of study that defies any definition of the word “natural.”
Hōgetsu served as both translator and director for the epoch-making 1911
Japanese production of Ningyō no ie (A Doll’s House) that catapulted Matsui
Sumako to stardom. Critics hailed Sumako’s performance of Nora as the first
example of natural gender performance on the Japanese stage, which had
long been dominated by the practice of female impersonation by male actors
(onnagata). Her delivery of Hōgetsu’s translated lines was particularly singled
out for praise, and she quickly developed a reputation for her ability to
quickly and perfectly memorize entire scripts – a feat that most of her male
contemporaries on the Japanese stage achieved only with the greatest diffi-
culty. However, the spectacle of a Japanese woman speaking translated lines
and playing the part of a Norwegian housewife offers the most conspicuous
evidence that the relationship between vernacular realism and gender repre-
sentation was anything but transparent. In the case of modern Japan, transla-
tion was the crucial third element that linked them together, ensuring that
what Naturalist criticism proclaimed as “natural,” whether in terms of con-
tent or of stylistic mode, actual practice revealed to be essentially exotic.

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The rise of modern women’s literature
rebecca copeland

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inspired a variety of social, political, and

religious reforms. Eager to lead the country into the folds of “civilized
nations,” progressive-minded politicians and intellectuals encouraged mod-
ifications in language, literature, music, theater, dress, national governance,
and education. Women were a major target of reform. Captivated by
Western rhetoric then popular, reformers believed that the status of a
nation’s women was the measure of that nation’s civilization. While progress
was afoot in Japan on many levels, Japanese women, or so these reformers
believed, were far from modern. In order to address this wrong, new fashions
were encouraged. Women would be required to change their clothing, their
cosmetics, their speech, the way they arranged their hair, some were even
encouraged to learn the latest trends in ballroom dancing – all in an attempt
to modernize. In 1871 five girls were sent to the United States on a mission to
study American womanhood. Later that year a nationwide educational
ordinance was passed making schooling mandatory for all children. Girls
were ensured an equal education with boys, at least for the first year. In
journals and magazines writers began arguing for equality in marriage and
the elimination of prostitution and concubinage – all to the further improve-
ment of women’s rights. Women began to assume more prominent roles
outside their traditional occupations – in volunteer organizations, on political
platforms, and in a limited number of new professions. By the mid 1880s,
male educators and writers began to clamor for a modern woman writer.
Women were shortly to answer the call.
Certainly, women had been writing all along. Poetry schools, particularly
those promoting the aesthetics of the Kokin wakashū (Collection of Poems
Ancient and Modern, 905), had long been in operation and served as finishing
schools for young women with the financial wherewithal to afford the
tuition. Many of these schools persisted into the Meiji period and offered
women an important outlet for their creative endeavors. The Haginoya, for

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example, established by Nakajima Utako (1841–1903), enrolled Higuchi Ichiyō

(1872–96) and Miyake (née Tanabe) Kaho (1868–1943), among other women
writers. But for most progressive educators and writers at the time, these
schools produced, with rare exception, old-fashioned replicas of a tired
tradition. The call was out for a “Modern Murasaki,” a “Meiji Shōnagon,”
in short, a writer of prose fiction who would grapple with contemporary
issues in a modern idiom.
Prose fiction by women writers in the modern period is generally
acknowledged to have begun with Miyake Kaho and her 1888 novella
Yabu no uguisu (Warbler in the Grove). Kaho opened the gates and stories
by women trickled out yearly, eleven in 1889; thirteen in 1891; and finally,
in a relative deluge of activity, twenty-four in 1895. Numerous journals
and periodicals provided outlets for these female-authored works. Jogaku
zasshi (Women’s Education Magazine), founded in 1885, was important
not only as a forum for women’s writing but for providing the encour-
agement and impetus to many aspiring authors. With the dual goals of
encouraging self-worth among a female readership while at the same
time disabusing male readers of chauvinistic attitudes, the journal dedi-
cated space to women’s writing. Moreover, the editor, Christian educator
Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942), despaired that many male-authored
works were inappropriate reading material for his female audience, either
because they relied too heavily on arcane and overly erudite diction or
because the subject matter was licentious. He openly solicited works
from women. Iratsume (The Maiden) was inaugurated in 1887 under the
editorship of the rising novelist Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), who along
with the journal’s co-founders was interested in promoting women’s
literary endeavors. Like the Woman’s Education Magazine, it focused on
a readership of middle- to upper-class women, and catered to male
readers in addition to female. Mainstream newspapers, such as the
Yomiuri, offered women an opportunity to publish their works, and the
mainstream literary periodicals Miyako no hana (Flower of the Capital,
est. 1888), Shin Shōsetsu (The New Novel, est. 1889), Taiyō (The Sun, est.
1895), and Bungei kurabu (Literary Arts Club, est. 1895) frequently included
works by women. In 1895 Literary Arts Club published the first special
issue devoted exclusively to women’s writing, then referred to as keishū
bungaku (ladies’ literature), showcasing twelve female writers and in
some cases presenting their calligraphy and even their photographs.
The issue was a runaway success, selling out the thirty thousand copies
of its first printing and going to print for a second run.

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Women writers clearly were not without encouragement in their literary

endeavors. To this end, male mentors were particularly influential. Male
relatives – fathers, brothers, uncles – occasionally male teachers, and even
husbands, encouraged these soon-to-be writers to pursue their craft. Miyake
Kaho, for example, was initially promoted by the literary lion Tsubouchi
Shōyō (1859–1935), who was an acquaintance of her father’s. Koganei Kimiko
(1871–1956) had an ally in her literary brother, Mori Ōgai (1862–1922);
Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864–96) was married to the editor Iwamoto
Yoshiharu; and with the help of her father Kitada Usurai (1876–1900) appren-
ticed herself to Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903), the leader of the Ken’yūsha (Friends
of the Inkstone) literary society.
But mentorship also brought with it the power and privilege of determin-
ing artistic direction. The very term used to describe women writers at this
time, keishū sakka, is indicative of this direction. Derived from China where it
denoted talented and sequestered “ladies,” the term suggests privilege, dec-
orum, and high-mindedness. Generally daughters of affluent and distin-
guished families, these keishū sakka – or lady writers – had received an
above-normal education. Many had attended the new government-funded
secondary schools for women or those private academies founded by
Christian missionaries. They were conversant with Western ideas and were
eager to participate in the modernizing efforts of their male counterparts. In
her Warbler in the Grove, Miyake Kaho introduces readers to two of these
newly fashioned women. Namiko and Hamako, both products of the Meiji
reforms, wear their imported Western gowns with grace and assurance, their
conversations richly garnished with English. While Kaho’s women encounter
the West in their exclusive boarding school, Kimura Akebono (1872–90)
treated readers to the vision of the Japanese woman conquering the West
on foreign soil. In her delightfully imaginative Fujo no kagami (A Mirror for
Womanhood, 1889) she writes of a young Japanese woman who travels to
England and the United States where she attends college, impressing all with
her grace and brilliance. When she returns to Japan, she builds a silk factory
for women workers – complete with a nursery and daycare center.
A number of the women who wrote during this period found their way to
literature via the lecture circuits, having earlier made a name for themselves
as participants in the Jiyū minken undō or Freedom and People’s Rights
movement. When women were banned from the lecture stage in the late
1880s, they turned their energies to writing. Their subsequent works reflect
their political agenda. This is true of Nakajima Shōen (1864–1901), the former
Kishida Toshiko, who contributed Sankan no meika (The Noble Flower of the

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Valley) to the burgeoning offerings by women in 1889. Loosely based on her

own experiences, the work is considered the first “political novel” by a
woman. Shōen’s willingness to use her own life as the basis for her fiction
encouraged other women to do the same. Shimizu Shikin (1868–1933), a
former younger colleague of Shōen’s on the lecture circuit, also recounted
experiences from her own life in “Koware yubiwa” (The Broken Ring, 1891).
Describing a woman who refuses to abide by the traditional lessons learned at
home and school that would have her submit to an unhappy marriage, Shikin
takes Kaho’s outwardly westernized woman and liberates her spirit. Fukuda
(née Kageyama) Hideko (1865–1927), who also shared the lecture stage with
Shōen and Shikin, memorialized her experiences in the autobiographical
record Warawa no hanseigai (My Life at Mid-point, 1904).
Most women writers of the Meiji period grounded their fiction in their
own personal realm. Few had the imaginative vision of Kimura Akebono and
most were hesitant to peer beyond the confines of their own experience.
Those who did often met criticism. When Kitada Usurai wrote of scenes in
the Yoshiwara licensed quarter in her 1895 piece “Asamashi no sugata”
(Wretched Sights), she was harshly rebuked by critics who felt she had
overstepped her bounds as a lady writer. Miyake Kaho was similarly criticized
for writing dialogue that featured a woman of ill repute. How was it possible
for a proper young lady to have access to such a character? Either Kaho had
not written the scene in question. Or this lady writer was no lady. Most
women writers of this age, therefore, steered away from overt social criticism
and trained their sights on the traditional marriage system, limiting them-
selves to marriage plots. Many works by women of this period, therefore,
describe a young woman’s (reluctant) preparation for marriage; her disap-
pointment in the marital union or else her disappointment in her inability to
marry the man of her choice or to marry at all; her unfair treatment at the
hands of her in-laws; and her suicide (or at the very least “self” sacrifice) as the
result of any or all of these scenarios. Kitada Usurai, before offending critics,
had made her debut with “Sannin yamome” (The Widowed Three, 1894)
which charts the fates of three young people whose lives are destroyed by a
capricious family system that values only loyalty and finds no room for
individual love. When women resist marriage, happiness is not guaranteed.
In “Shirobara” (White Rose, 1895) Tazawa Inafune (1874–96) writes passio-
nately of a young woman who fights back, struggling to retain her integrity
under the patriarchal system. Intelligent, idealistic, and morally courageous,
when the heroine refuses the marriage her father has arranged for her, the
would-be suitor tricks her into traveling with him to a seaside resort where he

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drugs her with chloroform and rapes her. When she regains consciousness,
she throws herself in the sea. The penalties were severe for those who chose
to ignore contemporary social values. Fiction by women in this era is there-
fore often dark and morbid, but not without exception. Shimizu Shikin’s
“Imin gakuen” (School for Émigrés, 1899) recounts the happy union of a
young woman who fears her husband will divorce her when he discovers she
is related to a burakumin, or outcaste. Far from it, his love only intensifies and
they slip away to Hokkaido – in a move that some say prefigures Hakai (The
Broken Commandment, 1906) by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943).
For many Meiji women translation offered another creative outlet. The
above-mentioned Nakajima Shōen translated/adapted Bulwer-Lytton’s
Eugene Aram in 1887 under the title Zen’aku no chimata (The Crossroads of
Good and Evil). Koganei Kimiko was well known for her translations of
German and English poetry into graceful classical Japanese. But none
achieved the recognition that Wakamatsu Shizuko received for her many
translations from English. Shizuko is most remembered for Shōkōshi, her
translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885–6),
which was serialized from 1890 to 1892. Shizuko’s translation is important
not only for introducing readers to literature for children, but also for forging
a path to genbun-itchi or a modern literary vernacular.
Shizuko’s translation, like many of the works noted above, was published
in the pages of Women’s Education Magazine. Women were not the only
contributors to the journal. By 1892 it had begun to showcase some of the
brightest young male talents in Japan, including Hoshino Tenchi (1862–1950),
Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94), and the aforementioned Shimazaki Tōson.
These young men were eager to redirect Women’s Education Magazine
along more purely literary lines. In order to preserve the didactic call of his
journal, while answering the demands of his young male colleagues,
Iwamoto divided the journal into a “White Covers” and a “Red Covers,”
with issues published alternately. “White Covers” was devoted to social
reform, literary criticism, poems, and short stories and was read by both
men and women; while “Red Covers” dealt with household management
and children and appealed almost exclusively to women. Iwamoto assigned
Shimizu Shikin and Wakamatsu Shizuko to editorial positions in the latter.
Although the division of the journal gave women more authority over their
half, it also subordinated their literary efforts to those of men. It marginalized
their writing by limiting it primarily to the home and the practical, while
men’s efforts were held to be critical, cerebral, high art. Despite Iwamoto’s
efforts to accommodate his male protégés, they found his insistence on

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literary didacticism, rigid values, and pragmatism too stifling for their evol-
ving romanticism. In 1893 they broke with Women’s Education Magazine and
formed Bungakukai (Literary World), which would serve as an important
outlet for the early Romantic movement in Japanese literature until its
demise in 1898.
A number of women writers also published in the pages of Literary World,
most significantly Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–96), whose work “Takekurabe”
(Comparing Heights) was serialized here from 1895 to 1896. “Takekurabe,”
heralded as a masterpiece, is a bittersweet story of unrequited love, class
conflict, and the painful dulling of dreams. Significantly, the story is set on the
border of the licensed quarters for legal prostitution. Many of Ichiyō’s stories
deal with the denizens of the quarters and their ill-fated lives. Unlike her
contemporaries, who wrote of prostitution with a somewhat speculative
detachment, Ichiyō’s depiction of the quarters was based on actual observa-
tion as she found herself living outside the walls of the quarters. Although she
had aspired to an education, her family’s fortunes had fallen, and Ichiyō spent
her adulthood struggling to survive. For her, writing was more than a
pastime, it was a livelihood. She set about her task with great diligence and
pride; her works – often wistful and elegiac – are known for their beautifully
wrought prose tinged with the elegance of the Heian classics, which she had
studied as a young girl, and the wit of “floating world” author, Ihara Saikaku
(1642–93), whom she studied independently once she aspired to take up
writing as a profession. Ichiyō was the only truly professional woman writer
of her era. Unlike her keishū contemporaries, she was not supported by a
father, brother, or husband. Legally the family head, she scrambled to
provide for her mother and sister. Whereas other female authors were
criticized for investing too much of themselves in their craft, Ichiyō appeared
all the more admirable and tragic for her dedication to writing.
Although the 1895 special keishū issue of the Literary Arts Club was followed
by a sequel in 1897, the era of “women writers” had technically ended in 1896
with the deaths of three of its most prominent members: Wakamatsu
Shizuko, Tazawa Inafune, and Higuchi Ichiyō. The loss of these three bright
lights in the literary realm was followed by the loss of legal rights in the
political realm. In 1898, after nearly a decade of debate that had not included
female representation, the Meiji Civil Code was finally inaugurated. Women
were stunned to find that not only did the code fail to advance their cause, it
confined all women under a patriarchal system that had earlier been exclusive
to the samurai class, in many ways the most restrictive of the four former
classes. Women were denied basic legal rights and expected to submit to the

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will of the household head, who was invariably male. Rather than silencing
women, however, the conservative political trends encouraged women to
turn to literature all the more, either as readers of family romances or as
writers of stories that protested the frustrations of the family system. The
turn of the century also saw keishū sakka transition into the joryū sakka, or
writer of the female style. Having benefited from the universal educational
system and the leveling of the classes, the joryū sakka, unlike her more
reticent predecessor, was not averse to taking risks, defying social expecta-
tions, and presenting herself to public scrutiny.
From feminist orator to cloistered daughter, from imperial tutor to house-
hold maid, Meiji women writers hailed from diverse backgrounds and made
their mark in an impressive assortment of genres and styles: romantic poetry,
political essays, kabuki dramas, novellas, and stories. The works that
emerged during the period, and the image of the woman writing them,
were in constant flux, the terms of their evaluation shifting along with
attitudes governing the reception of women in the public sphere. During
the early part of the period, women writers were referred to as keishū sakka,
a term redolent with class and moral implications. By the end of the era, they
would be known as joryū, a term that while less exclusive was nevertheless
drenched in gender-based assumptions. Entering the public arena at a time
when the boundaries of that space were highly unstable, the appellation
“lady” writer allowed a certain elasticity. The writer could step past the lines
that had earlier demarked her limits and have a public voice as long as she
continued to speak as a lady. Women writers of this early period explored
new avenues of expression and embarked on new paths – some short and
untenable, others highly successful. Like their male counterparts, these
keishū writers were eager to craft a new language. In addition, they sought
styles and approaches that would meet the demands of a newly insistent
modernity. The works that emerged at this time are marked by unevenness,
experimentation, and energy.

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 62
Melodrama, family romance,
and the novel at the turn of the century
ken k. ito

Orphans, hidden identities, steep social ascents and even steeper descents,
villainy and virtue, and, above all, the moral consecration engendered by
suffering – these are the ingredients of the melodramatic mode that gripped
Japanese fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Although few Japanese
literary critics have used the term, the most prominent novels of this period
functioned as melodrama: they attempted to excavate stark moral polarity
from the messy realities of human relations. But, if this led to highly
emplotted narratives where good battled evil, it also laid bare the irresolvable
contradictions behind the yearning for moral certitude. The melodrama’s
trademark hyper-emotionalism stemmed from the impossibility of moral
clarity.
Most Western students of melodrama have identified it as a socially
engaged mode: melodrama addresses social ideologies in recently trans-
formed societies where older, more stable values have been overturned
and where newer values remain contested. Peter Brooks made this point
succinctly in his discussion of the rise of theatrical melodrama following the
French Revolution: “It comes into being in a world where the traditional
imperatives of truth and justice have been violently thrown into question, yet
where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life,
is of immediate, daily political concern.”1 Japan following the Meiji
Restoration experienced social upheaval every bit as sweeping as the
French Revolution, and the melodramatic mode endeavored to articulate
moral principles for the times. The issues confronted by Meiji melodramatic
fiction comprised a catalogue of modern dislocations: the monetization of
human relations in an emerging capitalist nation-state; the evaporation of the
Edo period status system and its replacement by ever-shifting occupational
1
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode
of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 15.

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and status categories; and the threats to family from new ideologies of
gender, love, and the individual.
Meiji melodramatic novels achieved unmatched social penetration by
riding the wave of Meiji print capitalism. The novels discussed here were
first serialized in newspapers. Konjiki yasha (The Golden Demon), the
blockbuster novel by Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) that stands as the definitive
example of the form, appeared in the Yomiuri shinbun between 1897 and 1902.
And Onna keizu (A Woman’s Pedigree), by Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), was
carried by Yamato shinbun in 1908. Both were quickly brought out in book
form by Shun’yōdō, the foremost literary publisher of the day, with numer-
ous subsequent editions. Appearing at a time when there was not yet a clear
demarcation between high and low in the literary field, these works and
others like it were broadly read by literary elites and ordinary consumers,
men and women, old and young. But it would be a mistake to understand the
immense popularity of Meiji melodrama as a phenomenon restricted to print
culture. Works like these were rapidly and repeatedly transformed into other
cultural media. Konjiki yasha, for example, was adapted for the stage while it
was still being serialized, and there were already five productions by 1903.
Artists produced picture books based upon the story, and poets turned it into
narrative poetry. When the movies arrived, the story was quickly put on film,
with approximately twenty versions following. Onna keizu was adapted into
an enduring favorite of the shinpa theater, a form that combined kabuki
conventions of staging and acting with Western realism to produce some-
thing that resembled Western theatrical melodrama. It is a sign of the
importance of theatrical adaptation that in 1914 Onna keizu’s author, Izumi
Kyōka, penned a new scene for the stage depicting the heart-rending final
farewells of the protagonist and his geisha lover; this scene grew so famous
that it came to function as an emblem for the story, although the original
novel did not contain it. Onna keizu was also adapted five times for the
movies. Meiji melodramatic fiction, then, was more than a literary genre –
it was a cultural phenomenon that jumped from one medium to the next,
persistently repeating its plots of domestic strife and superheated emotions.
The family – as a locus of moral and emotional responses to political,
economic, or social change – constituted the thematic center of Meiji melo-
dramatic fiction for specific historical reasons. At the turn of the twentieth
century, immense ideological forces were focused on the family, which the
Meiji state and its propagandists sought to employ as an instrument for social
stability amidst the disruptions of modernity. The state’s family initiatives
centered upon a model called the ie, which defined the family as a lineage

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continuing over time through generational replacements. The ie’s contribu-

tion to social stability was that it organized the family into a strict hierarchy.
By granting authority to a male househead, it placed men over women, and
parents over children. It prioritized birth order, determining family inheri-
tance through male primogeniture. The ideological convenience of the ie
was most prominently on display in family–state ideology, in which the
family ruled by its househead was seen as a synecdoche for the nation
ruled by the emperor. At the turn of the century the ideological system
centering on the ie was inescapable: it was enshrined in imperial rescripts,
taught in shūshin moral education textbooks, and empowered by the Meiji
Civil Code of 1898, which granted special authority to househeads.
Confronting a discursive universe dominated by an overdetermined model
of the family, Meiji melodramatists worked to produce alternatives and
revisions. They produced family romances in the general sense that they
offered substitutes for family relations usually presented as “natural” or
“traditional.” It is impossible, however, to attribute either total resistance
or complicity to these efforts. Constructed in the shadow of a hegemonic
discourse, these alternatives to the ie recycle even as they seek to displace.
This kind of ideological ambiguity runs through Konjiki yasha, a novel of
stunning extravagance, in terms both of the emotions it contains and of the
virtuosic prose enlisted to convey them. The main character of Konjiki yasha
is an orphan, a recurring figure in Meiji melodramatic fiction that serves a
range of thematic functions. The orphan can be an emblem for a culture in
transition, “fatherless” in the sense of being separated from his origins.
Without the protection of family, the orphan can exhibit heart-tugging
vulnerability, yet he or she can also be seen as a free agent, able to make
life’s choices and form new alliances outside of archaic encumbrances. The
orphan also presents an important index to the moral worth of the surround-
ing society, because the question of how he or she is treated strikes to the
core of a society’s values. The plot device employed by the melodramatic
family romance to resituate the orphan is adoption. This is a social practice
that can uphold conservative versions of family: the proponents of ie ideol-
ogy invariably valorized adoption because it provided a means to continue
family lineages amidst the uncertainties of biological reproduction. Yet the
very nature of adoption as a culturally constructed tie meant that it provided
a model for alternative, unofficial forms of affiliation.
Konjiki yasha contains adoptions of both types. Its orphaned protagonist,
Hazama Kan’ichi, is initially slated to marry Shigisawa Miya, the daughter
and only child of his benefactor, and become a yōshi, or adopted son-in-law,

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a legal status sanctioned by the Meiji Civil Code as a way of securing a male
househead. This is a prospect Kan’ichi welcomes because he is in love with
his gorgeous bride-to-be. Miya’s beauty, however, draws the attention of a
wealthy suitor, Tomiyama Tadatsugu, the son of the founder of “Tomiyama
Bank.” Miya chooses money over love, a choice supported by her parents.
This fateful decision calls forth a moment of superheated emotion, when
Kan’ichi gives voice to melodrama’s characteristic polar morality:
“I grant you that, when it comes to the power of money, there’s no
comparison between Tomiyama and me. He’s a rich man, rich as they
come, and I’m just a poor student. But think about this well, Miya –
human happiness is one thing money can’t buy. Happiness and money are
two different things. In human happiness, harmony in the household is what
comes first. And what is harmony in the household? It can’t be anything else
but that a husband and wife love each other deeply.”
At this moment, the novel attempts to institute a melodramatic binary
between love as virtue and money as vice. Many commentators have thus
viewed the work as a paean to the ideology of conjugal love that flowed into
Meiji Japan from the West. Subsequent developments, rife with ideological
contradictions, make this simple reading insupportable.
As a consequence of Miya’s decision, Kan’ichi is cast adrift. Not only does
he lose Miya, he also loses the family he might have gained through adoption;
he is once again an orphan. Kan’ichi disappears for a while from Miya’s life
and from the novel. When he returns to the story, he has undergone a
shocking transformation: he has become a brutal moneylender, preying on
the weaknesses of those in need. This change might have signaled a pre-
cipitous melodramatic descent, the lover become a dealer in filthy lucre. But
this moneylender is far from coldhearted; in fact, continually and painfully
tortured by the love he has lost, he feels too much. Kan’ichi’s degradation is a
marker of a love he cannot escape. This love, however, reveals itself to be of a
different nature from the conjugal love to which he had seemed to adhere.
Inflamed by separation and impossible longing, Kan’ichi’s “love” is a dark
passion felt as unbearable pain. With bitter irony, Miya too finds, after her
marriage, that she is enslaved by the same emotion. Despite possessing all the
wealth she desires, she cannot forget the love of her youth. Like Kan’ichi, she
becomes obsessed with a love whose measure is the suffering she embraces.
Konjiki yasha does not have a conclusion, because Ozaki Kōyō died before he
could complete the novel, but, where the work leaves off, Miya has been
made an invalid, nearly mad with longing. A major ideological contradiction
in Konjiki yasha, then, is that the “love” dominating its pages has nothing to

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do with virtue: the love possessing Kan’ichi and Miya can never join them – it
can only consume.
The trope of adoption, too, contains contradictions. Once Kan’ichi has left
the Shigisawa household, he learns the moneylender’s trade by entering a
quasi-adoption by a feared usurer called Wanibuchi Tadayuki. The text tells
us that the latter “thought of Kan’ichi as his own child.” The moral ambiguity
here is that the affect and the functions of family, including protection and
support, have been firmly located within the cash nexus. The impossibility of
disentangling sentiment from money continues to Kan’ichi’s final act in the
unfinished novel, which is to use the considerable wealth he has gained from
moneylending to rescue a couple on the verge of a love suicide. Kan’ichi gains
some comfort from helping another couple achieve what he has lost, figura-
tively adopting the couple and allowing them to realize the love-marriage
that eluded him. This is an adoption that stands as an alternative to any
conventional or juridical definition of family. Yet the patriarchal role that
Kan’ichi takes shows that this affiliation replicates some of the functions of
filiation. What is more, Kan’ichi’s adoption of the young couple is only made
possible by his financial power; his final satisfying embrace of love, it turns
out, is dependent on filthy lucre. The family romance of Konjiki yasha ends up
proving the inseparability of love and money.
Izumi Kyōka’s Onna keizu contains a metafictional nod to Konjiki yasha. Its
orphan hero, Hayase Chikara, is at one point mistaken for an actor playing
the role of Kan’ichi in a traveling theatrical adaptation of the earlier work.
This allusion is significant for a number of overlapping reasons. First, one
melodramatic novel pays homage to a famous predecessor, and, by having its
protagonist misidentified as an actor, suggests the histrionic heights he will
scale. Second, Izumi Kyōka was a disciple of Ozaki Kōyō, the literary god-
father of the turn of the century who led a coterie called the Kenyūsha, or
“Friends of the Inkstone.” The younger writer was best known not for
melodramatic fiction but for gothic tales of the supernatural. Thus, in
attempting a melodramatic novel of his own, he had acknowledged his
mentor, the writer of the monumental work of its type. This gesture, how-
ever, casts an additional, more personal shadow into Onna keizu, for Kōyō
had attempted to separate Kyōka from the woman he loved, a geisha who
would eventually become his wife. This incident lies behind the episode in
Onna keizu in which Sakai Shunzō, Hayase Chikara’s mentor, demands that
the younger man leave Otsuta, the geisha who has come to live with him.
The melodramatic binary of Onna keizu sets romantic love, of the sort
exemplified by Chikara and Otsuta, against the demands of family. The

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intertwining storylines are set into motion by a wish voiced by Chikara’s

friend, Kōno Eikichi, to marry Taeko, Sakai Shunzō’s beautiful daughter.
This wish stems not so much from romantic attraction but from Eikichi’s
urge to find a wife appropriate for his clan, which his description makes clear
is an ie:
“Yes, it’s been my father’s principle to assemble my siblings, our family, our
clan, in order to form a certain strata in society. To the extent possible, he
wants birth order to be reflected precisely in my sisters’ incomes, so that if
my oldest sister has 300 yen, the next would have 250 yen, the one after that
150 yen, and the youngest 100 yen.
So far, this has been carried out. And his vision is to have their children,
and then their grandchildren, gradually rise in social rank. Thus, if the
current generation consists of university graduates, then the next generation
will have doctorates, and the following, professorships. Do you see?
In other words, our family alone will be eventually able to form a political
party within the House of Peers. Our distant dream is to be able to organize
the cabinet from within our clan.”

The Kōno clan counts upon lineage to organize economic and political
relations. To join such a family, Taeko must be thoroughly investigated to
determine her fitness, and it is in this effort that Eikichi attempts to enlist
Chikara, whom he knows is close to the Sakai household.
This is an effort that Chikara, an adherent of romantic love who abhors the
marriage negotiations of the ie, will not assist. He is doubly reluctant because,
despite his feelings for Otsuta, he is himself drawn to Taeko, with whom he
was raised but dare not approach because she is the daughter of his master.
Chikara’s refusal leads Eikichi’s allies to punish and discredit him by telling
Sakai about his relationship with Otsuta. Angered over his disciple’s secret
sexual liaison, Sakai rises to the full height of his patriarchal entitlement and
confronts Chikara with an ultimatum: “Will you leave me, or leave your
woman?” Bound by loyalty and obligation, Chikara ultimately decides that he
must part from Otsuta.
At this point, Chikara cannot stay in Tokyo any longer, and he leaves alone
for Shizuoka (where he is mistaken for a traveling actor playing the part of
Kan’ichi). He chooses this provincial city because it is the home of the
extended Kōno clan, on whom he plots revenge and from whom he works
to protect Taeko. His actions reveal the hidden identities and hidden lineages
found among all the characters. These hidden identities start with Chikara
himself; although we have known he was Sakai’s disciple, we now learn that
he was formerly a notorious pickpocket taken in by Sakai to be reformed and

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educated. He is someone who owes his life to the affiliative relationship with
his mentor. Taeko, who has been presented thus far as the birth daughter of
Sakai and his wife, turns out to be the child that Sakai had with his mistress,
the geisha Koyoshi. This is a woman that Otsuta refers to as her “older sister,”
using geisha parlance for a respected senior woman in the trade. Otsuta
herself is an orphan, and so the occupational tie to Koyoshi is her most
important affiliation. Hidden lineages extend even to the Kōnos, the pro-
fessed adherents of the ie: it turns out that Eikichi’s older sister was actually
fathered by a stablehand who had an affair with her mother. The convoluted
hidden lineages of Onna keizu tell us that the ie is not what it seems, that its
most vociferous supporters suffer from moral rot, and that crucial human
linkages exist as affiliative relations outside of its confines.
In the last section of the novel, Chikara becomes a demonic antihero, acting
out his rage against the Kōnos, smug in their family ideology, and the pain of
his separation from Otsuta, who will die of tuberculosis. His revenge turns on
exposing the moral degradation of the ie. He succeeds in seducing at least one,
and possibly two, of Eikichi’s married older sisters. He reveals her origins to the
sister fathered by the stablehand. The Kōnos respond to these provocations by
trying, unsuccessfully, to poison him. The final confrontation with Kōno
Hideomi, Eikichi’s father and the family patriarch, surpasses even the novel’s
previous indulgence in excess. Face to face with Hideomi on a clifftop, a total
eclipse darkening the land, Chikara catalogs the transgressions of the Kōno clan
and demands its dissolution. Hideomi draws a pistol to murder Chikara, but is
thwarted by his daughters. Seeing that he can no longer count on his flesh and
blood, Hideomi first turns his pistol on his wife and then blows out his brains,
followed shortly by his daughters throwing themselves off the cliff! That night,
Chikara quietly kills himself by swallowing the poison meant for him; he dies
clutching to his breast a lock of Otsuta’s hair.
What can we make of this conclusion littered with bodies? Although there
is no doubt that the ie could be a coercive institution, the melodramatic urge
to brand it as evil has led to extravagant destruction. Kyōka himself, or
perhaps his publisher, appears to have had second thoughts about the ending.
The book version of the work published by Shun’yōdō in 1908, contained a
new epilogue in the form of Chikara’s suicide note addressed to Eikichi, in
which Chikara disavows what he has uncovered about the Kōno family
lineage and urges Eikichi to build “a second household, more beautiful and
pure.” This exhortation is puzzling because Eikichi nowhere exhibits the
potential for redemption. The author, in a further turn, repudiated this
epilogue in some later editions. The checkered history of the epilogue

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suggests, perhaps, the contradictions inherent in viewing any model of family

within a moral binary.
Japanese scholars have had difficulty positioning melodramatic fiction
within modern literary history. Works like Konjiki yasha and Onna keizu are
referred to as shinbun shōsetsu (newspaper novels), although many other kinds
of works, including canonized ones such as Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, were
serialized in newspapers. They are also called taishū shōsetsu (popular fiction),
although literary historians are aware that the term came into being in the
1920s as part of the effort to delineate the borders between high-culture and
popular literature. The powerful presence of melodramatic fiction at the turn
of the twentieth century and the audience it continued to hold in adapted
forms call for a better accounting of its historical position, its relations to
social realities and cultural discourses, and, especially, the impact it had on
later cultural production.

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Modern Japanese poetry to the 1910s
k ō j i k a w a m o t o

In a massive effort to “modernize” Japan, an enormous number of transla-

tions from Western books and documents were published, both officially and
privately, during a mere thirty- to forty-year period before and after the
country’s opening to the outside world in the late 1850s. Literature, too, was
made part of this wholesale importation of Western civilization, and while
stories like Robinson Crusoe (1872) and Aesop’s Fables (1873) were rendered into
Japanese, poetic translation had to wait until the early 1880s.
Shintaishishō (Selection of New-Style Poems, 1882) was the first anthology of
Western poems in translation. Though heavily censured by the leading literati
of the day, the anthology literally created a new age of Japanese poetry, and
younger readers ardently embraced its appearance. Prior to the publication of
the Shintaishishō, different kinds of poetry existed, a plethora of them, to be
sure, but no generic name for “poetry,” nor anything remotely comparable to
Western poems. There were thirty-one-syllable waka, orthodox linked verse
(renga), popular linked verse (haikai), and seventeen-syllable haiku, kyōka
(comic waka), senryū (comic haiku), kanshi (classical Chinese-style poetry),
and kyōshi (comic kanshi). Compared with Western poems, the Japanese
models tended to be extremely short. The word shi（詩）was used to indicate
only kanshi, a particular genre of poetry, and Shintaishishō should be given
credit for both adopting the word as a general term for “poetry” in the Western
sense and providing concrete examples of that form for the first time.
The three editors of the collection, professors at the recently founded
University of Tokyo, were not literary specialists: Toyama Masakazu
(1848–1900) was a sociologist and Yatabe Ryōkichi (1851–99) a botanist.
Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), though a German philosophy major and a kanshi
poet himself, was apparently not at home in “vernacular” literature of Japan.
This lack of proficiency, however, also meant freedom from old waka clichés
and stale literary conventions. Of the translations from Shakespeare, Thomas
Gray, Longfellow, Tennyson and others, Yatabe’s rendering of Gray’s “Elegy

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Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gurē-shi funjō kankai no shi) stands out as

an exceptionally fine piece of work. Yatabe translated Gray’s four-line stanzas
of iambic pentameter into three-line stanzas of “double 7–5” syllabic meter:
two traditional 7–5 syllable lines are combined into a line of 7–5–7–5 meter
with a light caesura in the middle. Gray’s first two lines:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lee
are neatly rendered into a line and a half in the Japanese version:
Yamayama kasumi (7) / iriai no (5) // kane wa naritsutsu (7) / no no ushi wa (5)
Shizukani ayumi (7) / kaeri-yuku (5) //
(The mountains become hazy, the evening / bell is tolling, and the herd in
the fields
Slowly make their way back home /).
Yatabe and others intended to use samples like these to show, above all, the
verbal expanse possible in the Western forms: an expanse that allowed for the
development of “more or less continuous thought.” It was this verbal
expansiveness that they sought to contrast with the extremely limited span
of haiku and waka whose brevity was more akin to “sparklers or shooting
stars” in Toyama’s words.
Nevertheless, the so-called “new-style poem” (shintaishi) did not offer
anything revolutionary. As the editors themselves admitted, its meter was
the same old 7–5-syllabic schemes, which must have disappointed many
readers. From its recorded origin, meter in Japanese poetry had always
depended on a 7–5-syllabic count. For all their endeavors to “make it new,”
the editors of the Shintaishishō had few choices, settling on the 7–5 rhythm as
a final resort. However, the book was pioneering in three ways. First, it
employed a regular line break at the end of each verse, which, surprisingly
enough, had never been practiced in Japan before. Second, the stanzaic form
was a complete novelty. These two formal devices contributed significantly
to a visible and well-organized structuring of the poems. Third, the deliberate
and audacious choice of plain vocabulary and simple phraseology over
clichés – Wordsworth’s “real language of men” – provided much easier
reading, paving the way for longer poems.
The clumsy and overly casual look of the Shintaishishō convinced readers
that they could easily outdo the authors, and similar books of “new-style”
poems and verses sprang up in rapid succession. These books were mostly of
inferior quality, however, and contributed primarily toward the promulga-
tion of military and children’s songs. The Shintaishishō also triggered

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the appearance of two narrative poems of some length. Yuasa Hangetsu’s

(1858–1943) Jūni no ishizuka (The Twelve Stones, 1885) tells, in 5–7 meter, the
story of Judge Ehud, who stabs the Moabite King Eglon and frees the children
of Israel (Judges 3:15–30). Ochiai Naobumi’s (1861–1903) highly popular Kōjo
Shiragiku no uta (Song of the Faithful Daughter Shiragiku, 1888), on the other
hand, is a Japanese translation in 7–5 meter of Inoue Tetsujirō’s narrative
kanshi (1884), about the trials and tribulations of a samurai’s daughter during
the Seinan War (1877). Thus, the shintaishi, which became the equivalent of a
Western poem, took its place among the multitude of older poetic genres.
The term was later replaced by the simpler shi, which now means both
poetry in general and Western-style poems in particular.
The most notable outgrowth of the Shintaishishō came out in 1889. A year
after his return from Germany, the military doctor and, later, eminent
novelist and critic Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) published Omokage (Vestiges), a
collection of poetic translations and adaptations. It was generally considered
far superior to the Shintaishishō in terms of literary virtuosity and stylistic
refinement. While four other authors are cited, Ōgai obviously master-
minded the whole project, proposing general and specific plans and explicat-
ing German and English poems to other authors. With their graceful wording
and well-balanced 7–5 meters, the Japanese poems in Omokage were regarded
as excellent models for future poems.
Omokage experimented with several ideas, including four types of transla-
tion or adaptation according to their degrees of fidelity to the source text: the
“semantic,” “syllabic,” “rhyming,” and “tonal” translation. The “semantic”
variety simply conveys a poem’s meaning, regardless of the poetic form
adopted in Japanese translation. The “syllabic” translation puts emphasis on
the syllabic pattern of the original poem. For example, Goethe composed
“Mignon” (“Kennst du das Land?”), from his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,
in iambic pentameter, a line generally consisting of 10 syllables. Ōgai‘s
Japanese version “Miniyon no uta” (Mignon’s Song) accordingly assigns
two 10-syllable segments to each line, considering that two Japanese syllables
are more or less tantamount to one German or English syllable:
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht
Aoku hareshi sora yori / shizuyakani kaze fuki
(From the clear blue sky, the wind softly blows)

With its deep-felt longing for the bright sunshine of Italy, “Miniyon no uta”
was one of the best-loved pieces of the collection. The same 10–10-syllable
meter is employed in Ōgai‘s “Manfuretto issetsu” (A Fragment of Manfred)

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from a play by Byron. Such attempts at “syllabic” translation reveal the

editors’ zeal in creating alternatives to the all too hackneyed 7–5 and 5–7
meters. Other experiments in meter included “Ashi no kyoku” (Reed Songs),
which employed an 8–7 meter, reflecting the alternating 8- and 7-syllable lines
of Nikolaus Lenau’s original “Schilflieder,” and “Aru toki” (Once), based on
Eduard Ferrand’s “Einst”, translated in 8–6 meter.1
The third category of “rhyming” translation adds end rhyme to the above
two elements. Rhymes in Japanese verse are mostly ineffectual and, indeed,
imperceptible in most cases. Apart from Ōgai’s “Mignon’s Song,” however,
Ochiai Naobumi’s “Ineyokashi” was another favorite, presenting a 7–5-meter
translation of the song “Good Night” from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
The Japanese version rhymes ababcdcd exactly like the original. The fourth
category, the “tonal” type, applies merely to kanshi translations, which not
only rhyme but also replicate the metrical scheme of the German and English
poems by converting stressed and unstressed syllables into Chinese charac-
ters of contrasting tones. Early to mid-Meiji Japan saw the high tide of
Chinese studies, and kanbun (classical Chinese writings read in Japanese),
including kanshi, were familiar to the intellectuals of the day. Ōgai’s kanshi
rendering of Lenau’s “Gekkō” (Das Mondlicht) and another passage from
Byron’s Manfred are a tremendous tour de force. The same is true for
“Kikaigashima” (Kikai Island), Ichimura Sanjirō’s (1864–1947) kanshi adapta-
tion of an episode from The Tales of the Heike, and Ōgai’s “Tōkyō-kō”
(Chivalrous Robber) from Wilhelm Hauff’s Die Karawane (The Caravan).
Regrettably, only a few can fully appreciate Ōgai’s and Ichimura’s achieve-
ments today, let alone follow their lead.
The first major poet to appear in the wake of Omokage was Shimazaki
Tōson (1872–1943). His first collection Wakanashū (Young Herbs, 1897) broke
new ground in new-style poetry. His poems, full of youthful pathos and
sensuality, are an exquisite mixture of traditional waka suaveness and fresh
“modern” sensibilities. His “Hatsukoi” (First Love), which begins “Mada
agesomeshi maegami no” in a 7–5 meter, was enthusiastically welcomed by
young readers:

When I saw you under the apple tree

With your hair swept up for the first time
...
When you gently extended your soft white hand

1
Kobori Keiichirō and Kanda Takao, eds., Omokage, in Meiji-Taishō yakushishū (Tokyo:
Kadokawa Shoten, 1971), 105–67.

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And gave me an apple

It was the very first time I loved someone
With the pale red of the autumn fruit
(Translated by Leith Morton)

Reform movements in traditional short poems started in the early 1890s,

led by Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). While a student at the University of Tokyo,
he initiated an effort to revitalize haiku, which had entered a dry period. An
artist friend introduced him to shasei (sketching from nature), as it was then
practiced at the National School of Art under the Italian painter Antonio
Fontanesi (1818–82). Shiki advocated shasei as a means of replacing over-
worked formulas with writing based on real-life observation, thereby making
haiku a truly modern genre. Traditional haikai renga (popular linked poetry)
consisted of thirty-six verses composed alternatively by two or more people.
Shiki despised linked poetry, decrying the practice as an outmoded social
game without an ounce of individualism. Shiki freed hokku (the 5–7–5 opening
verse of linked verse) from the ensuing linked verses and renamed it haiku,
regarding it as an autonomous modern poem:
Keitō no The coxcombs –
jūshigohon mo there must be fourteen,
arinubeshi fifteen of them out there
(Translated by Kōji Kawamoto)

Using the medium of the newspaper, which was rapidly gaining ground at
this time, Shiki gained a steady following for his new movement. Together
with his disciple Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) and others, he laid the
groundwork for what would become the most popular poetic genre in
Japan, which today is said to have a million professional and amateur
practitioners.
In 1898, Shiki directed his attention to waka, a far older poetic form of 5–7–
5–7–7 meter, again using the principle of shasei to renovate a traditional
genre. Having become mostly bedridden since 1897, he again conducted his
campaign through newspapers and magazines. Prizing Man’yōshū (Collection
of Ten Thousand Leaves, late eighth or early ninth century) for its unaffected
language and close intimacy with nature, Shiki derided the highly esteemed
Kokinshū (Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, c. 905) for its shallow
witticism and childlike wordplay. The realism (shasei) Shiki praised in
Man’yōshū consisted mainly in careful observation of everyday happenings
and seasonal changes in nature:

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Kame ni sasu The sprays of wisteria

fuji no hanabusa arranged in the vase
mijikakereba are so short
tatami no ue ni they don’t reach
todokazarikeri to the tatami
(Translated by Burton Watson)

Shiki’s group turned out many outstanding poets, including Itō Sachio
(1864–1913), Shimaki Akahiko (1876–1926), and Nagatsuka Takashi
(1879–1915). Psychiatrist Saitō Mokichi (1882–1953), above all, won huge
critical acclaim with his first collection Shakkō (Red Light), published in
1913. Faithful as he was to Shiki’s high esteem for Man’yōshū and his tenet
of shasei, Saitō deepened his realist principle by expanding its scope to
“inner life.” His tense lyricism, stirred by a strong sense of being alive,
earned him a reputation as one of the greatest waka poets in modern
times:
Nodo akaki The red-throated
tsubakurame futatsu chimney swallows, two of them,
hari ni ite upon the rafters –
tarachine no haha wa and underneath, my mother
shinitamō nari who is going to die now.
(Translated by Edith Marcombe Shiffert and Yūki Sawa)

In 1899, the school teacher and waka poet Yosano Hiroshi (pseudonym
Tekkan, 1873–1935) formed Shinshisha (New Poetry Society) and he
started the magazine Myōjō (Venus) the following year to promote
waka and new-style poems in a romantic and aesthetic vein. Tekkan
was a fine poet who is known for his exquisite love verses, but his
greatest achievement lay in helping Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) make a
sensational debut with her first waka collection Midaregami (Tangled
Hair) in 1901.
Yosano Akiko joined Tekkan’s group in 1900, fell in love with him, and
boldly gave voice in her poetry to the innermost thoughts and feelings of a
young girl in love. The book startled the strongly male-dominated society of
the time with its bold affirmation of love and instinct, proud flaunting of
youth and feminine beauty, and point-blank denigration of moral scruples.
She was well read in classical Japanese literature and, with a daring mixture of
words borrowed from recent Western and Japanese literature, created her
own style of great intensity:

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Chibusa osae Pressing my breasts

shinpi no tobari I softly kick aside
soto kerinu the curtain of mystery
Koko naru hana no How deep the crimson
kurenai zo koki of the flower here.
(Translated by Janine Beichman)
Publishing a series of personal poetry collections in rapid succession, Akiko
quickly established her fame as a modern-day rival to the eminent women
poets of the Heian period.
Given the patronage of such luminaries as Mori Ōgai, the New Poetry
Society produced a number of major poets, waka and otherwise. Ishikawa
Takuboku (1886–1912), a precocious and short-lived prodigy, revolutionalized
waka in his two collections: Ichiaku no suna (A Handful of Sand, 1910) and
Kanashiki gangu (Sad Toys), published posthumously in 1912. Carefully avoid-
ing classical literary language, he worked out a unique semi-colloquial
delivery while successfully maintaining an intimate poetic rhythm that
used unusual enjambment. His subject was often a poor aspiring poet’s
frank expression of longing, nostalgia, and bitter sense of defeat:
Tawamure ni Carrying mother on my back
haha o seoite Just for a joke.
sono amari Three steps:
karoki ni nakite then weeping –
sanpo ayumazu She’s so light.
(Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwayte)
Ueda Bin’s (1874–1916) Kaichō-on (The Sound of the Tide), the most
important collection of translated poems in modern Japan, appeared in
1905. In contrast to earlier collections containing chiefly British, American,
and German poems, Kaichō-on featured a considerable number of the latest
French and Belgian poets of the Parnassian and Symbolist schools: Leconte de
Lisle, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile
Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach, and others. Through Ueda’s superb transla-
tions and his well-informed commentaries, Japanese readers had their first
encounter with the decadence, spleen, and anxiety of European modernism.
It is especially worthy of note that, following the steps of Mori Ōgai, Ueda
experimented with various new meters based on alternating seven and five
syllables: for example, on top of the standard 7–5–7–5 (“double 7–5”) and
5–7–5–7 meters, he exploited 5–5–7–7, 5–7–5, and 8–7–6 meters. By far the most
admired of all the pieces in the collection is “Rakuyō” (Fallen Leaves),
a stunning Japanese rendering of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne”

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(Autumn Song). The first strophe of Ueda’s translation, placed side by side
with the French text, reads:
Les sanglots longs Aki no hi no
Des violons vioron no
De l’automne tameiki no
Blessent mon cœur mi ni shimite
D’une langueur hitaburuni
Monotone. uraganashi
The Japanese version roughly means: “The sighs of violins on an autumn day
sink deep into my heart and make me feel so sad.” Ueda conveys the mean-
ing, mood, and music of the source text in six Japanese lines of five syllables
each. This meter, his own invention, gives the same contradictory impres-
sions of lightness and torpor as the extremely short lines of the French poem.
The frequent occurrence of the vowel “o” in the first three lines reproduces
the prominent “dark” and nasal vowels, such as [ɔ], [o], [œ], [ɔ]̃ , and [ɑ̃ ], in the
original French verse, and the sharp [i] sound dominating the whole Japanese
stanza adds poignancy to the dejected mood.
The Symbolist poems in Kaichō-on, such as Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du
soir” (Evening Harmony) and Mallarmé’s “Soupir” (Sigh), received a warm
and immediate welcome in Japan, and not only because Ueda deliberately
made use of graceful poetic words and phrases culled from ancient classics.
French Symbolist poetry, with its harmonious fusing of inner feelings and
natural landscapes as well as its heavy dependence on the evocative power of
verbal music, has a peculiar affinity with traditional waka poetry, especially in
the vein of Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times,
early thirteenth century). Ueda himself often explained Symbolism in terms
of Japanese aesthetic ideals such as “yūgen” (mystery and depth). Among the
poets deeply inspired by Kaichō-on, Kanbara Ariake (1876–1952) had already
established a reputation as a Romantic poet under the influence of Keats,
Shelley, and, later, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His fascination with Ueda’s
collection, however, provided an impetus to his development as a poet and
to his fourth collection, Ariake-shū (1908), which contained deeply charming
poems such as “Matsurika” (Jasmine) and “Tsukishiro” (Faint whitening of
the sky at moonrise), each composed in a uniquely Symbolist manner.
Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), a former member of Tekkan’s group, was
no doubt the most fervent follower of Ueda Bin’s teachings of aestheticism
and fin-de-siècle decadence. He quickly assimilated everything he had learned
from Ueda and amazed the reading public with his first book of poems

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entitled Jashūmon (The Evil Faith), published in 1909. Here are the opening
lines of the most famous piece “Jashūmon hika” (Secret Song of the Heretics),
a fascinating poem more in an atypical Parnassian rather than a Symbolist
vein:

I believe in the heretical teachings of a degenerate age,

the witchcraft of the Christian God,
...
The blue-eyed Dominicans chanting the liturgy who tell me even
in dreams
Of the God of the forbidden faith, or of the blood-stained Cross,
The cunning device that makes a mustard seed big as an apple,
The strange collapsible spyglass that looks even at Paradise.
(Translated by Donald Keene)

In his sumptuous and sensual style, Hakushū intentionally exoticizes

Christian faith, with obvious anachronism, as if it were being seen from the
eyes of people of the Edo period under the edict against Christianity. In his
second collection Omoide (Memories, 1912), he exoticized his native town
Yanagawa (in Kyūshū) in the same way, “seeing” the town from the eyes of a
foreign visitor. In 1913 Hakushū also published his first waka collection, Kiri no
hana (Paulownia Blossoms), whose delicate and sensuous freshness also owes
a great deal to Kaichō-on:
Kimi kaesu I see her off in the morning
asa no shikiishi the pavement crunching
sakusaku to under her feet –
yuki yo ringo no Oh, snow, keep falling on her
ka no gotoku fure like the scent of apples!
(Translated by Kōji Kawamoto)

Kaichō-on was one of the last major books of translated poems to consistently
use alternating seven-and-five rhythmic patterns and marked one of the last
collections of poetry translated into fixed metrical form. The movement
toward colloquial free verse was under way since around 1907. Novelist
Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) published Sango-shū (Coral Collection) in 1913, and
his fluent free verse translations of modern French poets from Baudelaire to
Mathieu de Noailles were widely acclaimed. In the same year, poet and
sculptor Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), a former member of Tekkan’s
group who later studied art in New York, London, and Paris, published
Dōtei (Journey, 1914), a ground-breaking anthology of colloquial poems.
Mori Ōgai’s curt and purely colloquial translations of German Expressionist

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poets Richard Dehmel and Klabund, in his collection Sara no ki (Sal Tree,
1915), made a great impact on other translators and poets. Ueda Bin had also
been trying his hand at colloquial style, and his work was posthumously
compiled and published in 1920 as Bokuyōshin (Pan), which included superb
renderings of late nineteenth-century French poets like Tristan Corbière,
Jules Laforgue, and Rémy de Gourmont. These fine examples led in time to
the epoch-making appearance in 1917 of Hagiwara Sakutarō’s (1886–1942) first
anthology Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), which communicates the
urban solitude, melancholy, and nervous thrills of modern man in a highly
sophisticated colloquial style. His “Kaeru no shi” (Death of a Frog) reads:
A frog was killed.
A circle of children raised their hands.
All together
lovely
bloody hands they raised.
The moon rose.
On the hill a man is standing.
Under the hat is his face.
(Translated by Edith Marcombe Shiffert and Yūki Sawa)
Since the simple 7–5 and 5–7 meters, as well as their newly devised variations,
sound too vapid to modern ears, Japanese poems have been mostly written in
free verse since the 1910s. There is a sense, however, that Japanese poetry will
never break completely free from the spell of seven-and-five-syllable units.
T. S. Eliot’s following comment on vers libre remains true of modern Japanese
free verse, if his “iambic pentameter” is replaced with “seven-and-five
rhythm”:
But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language
has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic penta-
meter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and
constantly approximating to a very simple one.

(T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” 1917)

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Between the Western and the traditional:
Mori Ōgai, Nagai Kafū, and Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō
shunji chiba

The presiding member of the Meiji period’s premier literary circle Ken’yūsha,
Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903), died on October 30, 1903 at the age of thirty-six; within
four months Japan declared war on Russia, precipitating the Russo-Japanese
War, on February 8, 1904. Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) anticipated this colli-
sion and reasoned that knowledge of the enemy would be crucial to victory.
Aware of the importance of language acquisition, Futabatei enrolled in the
Russian program at the Tokyo Foreign Language School (Tōkyō Gaikokugo
Gakkō), and through his study came into contact with Russian literature and
European literary theory before composing Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887–9),
considered Japan’s first modern novel. Few of his contemporaries, however,
were capable of appreciating its innovations. Frustrated, Futabatei withdrew
from the literary scene. Filling the vacuum in his wake was Ozaki Kōyō, who
bridged the gulf between early modern fiction and the modern narrative forms
that emerged in earnest after the Russo-Japanese War.
The Treaty of Portsmouth ended hostilities on September 5, 1905. Victory
over Russia ostensibly vouchsafed Japan’s first-class nation status.
Concomitant was a euphoric attenuation of the psychosocial anxieties that
had plagued early Meiji, together with a wave of burgeoning individualism
among the younger generation. Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) touched on
these after-effects in a speech given six months after the war’s end:
“Presently, Japan has come out ahead in a test of military might, but that is
not all. This has likely had a profound impact on the Japanese at a mental
level.” Fittingly, Sōseki’s literary activity best encapsulated this shift. Born in
1867, less than a year before the late Kōyō, Sōseki did not debut until later,
achieving quick popularity with Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat) and
“London tō” (Tower of London) in January 1905, mere months after the
literary world had lost its primary figurehead. Soon thereafter the Naturalist

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authors – Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), Tayama

Katai (1872–1930), Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962), et al. – ushered in what
would be the heyday of Japanese Naturalism. The seeds he had sown finally
bearing fruit, Futabatei himself returned to the literary scene with Sono
omokage (An Adopted Husband, 1906).
Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) was equally galvanized, albeit belatedly. Ōgai had
studied abroad in Germany as an army surgeon from 1884 to 1888 and had
become a leader of the incipient literary community after his return with
several short stories set in Germany, including “Maihime” (The Dancing Girl,
1890), “Utakata no ki” (Foam on the Waves, 1890), and “Fumizukai” (The
Courier, 1891), lauded for their syncretic gabuntai (“elegant” or neoclassical)
style. A number of his translations of European literature also had an impact.
Moreover, he did much to assist the establishment of literary theory in Japan,
his contributions equal to those of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) and
Futabatei. Nevertheless, as Japan became embroiled in the war with Russia,
Ōgai found devoting further energies to such pursuits increasingly difficult
and abandoned literature.
The journal Subaru (1909–13) offered Ōgai an opportunity to return to the
literary scene. Two months after Yosano Tekkan (1873–1935) and Akiko’s
(1878–1942) poetry journal Myōjō (1900–8), the chief vehicle for Meiji era
Romanticism, ended its hundred-issue run in November 1908, Ishikawa
Takuboku (1886–1912), Yoshii Isamu (1886–1960), Kinoshita Mokutarō
(1885–1945) and other former contributors launched a new journal. Under
Ōgai’s leadership, Subaru would become an enclave for aesthetic anti-
Naturalism during the predominately Naturalist 1900s, not only carrying
narrative pieces like Ōgai’s “Hannichi” (Half-day, 1909), Vita Sexualis (1909),
Seinen (Youth, 1910), and Gan (Wild Goose, 1911–13), but also serializing Ōgai’s
column “Mukudori tsūshin” (Starling Notice), in which the author discussed
current trends in European letters.
In Seinen, Mōri Ōson, Ōgai’s self-caricature, is appraised by the protago-
nist-narrator as “a dried-up old man who would mingle with the fresh-faced
and dodder about confused, complain and make snide remarks, write stories
and plays plotted out as though by a surveyor taking geodesic measurements
with rod and twine.” Ōgai’s modern-day stories display a methodically
calculated and highly rational style, very much as if measured with “rod
and twine.” Although this humorously masochistic self-portrait does a mar-
velous job of relativizing the author, Ōgai was one of the foremost figures
conversant in Western literary thought, and occupied the seat of leadership in
the circles with which he associated.

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Futabatei and Ōgai were not alone in returning to the literary scene at this
juncture. Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), having made a name for himself as an
advocate of “Zolaism” with Yashin (Ambition) and Jigoku no hana (Hell
Flowers) in 1902, departed for the United States in 1903 and, after four years
in America and a fifth in France, returned to Japan in 1908. While still abroad,
Kafū periodically sent manuscripts to Tokyo for publication, culminating in
the well-received Amerika monogatari (American Stories, 1908), which com-
piled his narratives penned in the United States and France; its companion
volume Furansu monogatari (French Stories, 1909), on the other hand, was
banned by the censors and would not see wide circulation until 1915, in a
significantly redacted edition. This setback notwithstanding, Kafū followed
with a productive flurry, penning among others “Kitsune” (The Fox, 1908),
“Fukagawa no uta” (A Song of Fukagawa, 1909), “Kanraku” (Pleasure, 1909),
and “Sumidagawa” (The River Sumida, 1911). This career-defining period
helped breathe new life into the post-Russo-Japanese War literary scene.
With his extensive experience with Western civilization, Kafū spared
nothing in his excoriation of the superficial aping of the West in Japan’s
modernization. Not all were sympathetic, however: Ishikawa Takuboku
denounced him for “having the aura particular to rich kids of provincial
extraction who spend more time and money in Tokyo than they should, only
to return with no intention of doing much of anything, stopping everyone
they pass to sneer about how tawdry and coarse the local geisha are,” and
suggested in “Kire-gire ni kokoro ni ukanda kanji to kansō” (Thoughts and
Feelings that Came to Mind in Bits and Pieces) that “Mr. Kafū would be best
served by going back to Paris.” Still, the critique in these works interrogated
the fundamental form of Western and Japanese modernization and proble-
matized the current atmosphere of public self-congratulation.
In “Kichōsha no nikki” (Diary of a Returnee, 1909), Kafū laments Tokyo’s
deplorable state:
What are the modern Japanese thinking? Do they assume with no little pride
that with this they’ve become some outstanding, first-rate nation? This is
neither improvement, nor advancement, nor construction. Meiji is destruc-
tion. All they have done is tear down the beauty of the old system and
replace it with shoddy rubbish built overnight . . . From what I know of the
West, not all is everywhere modern. Despite modernity’s encroachments,
there remain spaces it cannot conquer. Otherwise put, the West has about it
a strong musk of ages past. It reeks of history.

Kafū recognized the contemporary West as predicated on its history and

traditions – hence his criticism of Japan’s emulation – but, perhaps informed

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by this understanding, his focus gradually shifted to Japan’s tradition and a

rediscovery of “Edo.” Kafū met Ōgai soon after the publication of Jigoku no
hana, and was elated when the latter confessed to having already read his debut
novel. Kafū would henceforth revere Ōgai as a mentor, and, with Ōgai’s
recommendation, was granted a professorship at Keiō University in 1910. In
May of the same year, he founded the journal Mita bungaku, and began serial-
izing the editorial Kōcha no ato as well as penning the short stories later collected
in Shinbashi yawa (Night Tales from Shinbashi, 1912). With Ōgai’s backing in the
form of the stories provided for each issue – such as “Fushinchū” (Under
Reconstruction, 1910), “Hanako,” and “Mōsō” (Daydreams, 1911) – and numer-
ous translations, Mita bungaku developed into one of the stronger bases for the
anti-Naturalist camp. April saw the debut of Mushanokōji Saneatsu’s (1885–1976)
and Shiga Naoya’s (1883–1971) journal Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910–23), while
September saw the second incarnation of the journal Shin-shichō (New Current
of Thought, 1910–11), whose group included Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965).
Together, these new journals signaled the dawn of Taishō literature.
The year 1910 witnessed two events crucial to modern Japanese history –
the Great Treason Incident and the Annexation of Korea. The former began
when the authorities got wind of an assassination plot against the emperor
hatched by two or three conspirators, and subsequently moved to crack
down on leftists in a spate of indiscriminate arrests. At the end of a secret
trial, twelve anarchists and socialists were executed, including socialist intel-
lectual Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), who bore no connection to the assassina-
tion plot. This stringent suppression proceeded in step with Japan’s imperial
ambitions, embodied in the colonization and annexation of Korea. As
Ishikawa Takuboku lamented in “Jidai heisoku no genjō” (Our Current
Closed Age, 1910), here the state’s authoritarian system, abetted by the
consolidation and expansion of its powers during wartime, took full shape.
In response, Ōgai published “Chinmoku no tō” (Tower of Silence, 1910)
and “Shokudō” (Cafeteria, 1910) in Mita bungaku. A satire, the allegorical
account of the former concerns the Paashii tribe’s “Tower of Silence” and
their custom of slaying those who read Western books. Closing the narrative,
the author writes: “In the Paashii tribe’s culture, both the arts and sciences
appear dangerous. At all times and places reactionary forces conspire against
those who walk a new path, and swell up to persecute them. All that differs is
the excuse given in each place and time. Pernicious Western writings are but
one.” “Shokudō,” by contrast, dramatizes a lunchtime conversation about
the Treason Incident between civil servants that delineates the history and
various filiations of anarchism. For Ōgai, this was a risky undertaking.

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Kafū’s reaction is recorded in “Hanabi” (Fireworks, 1919). Catching sight of

police caddies transporting the prisoners, he opines:
Of all I have encountered, this makes me most sick at heart. As a writer, one
must not remain silent in the face of suppression. In the Dreyfus Affair, was
not Zola forced into exile for crying out for justice? But I and my contem-
poraries have done nothing. I couldn’t bear my conscience, and have felt
intense shame in being a writer. I wondered whether it would be best to
lower my art to the level of the Edo period scribblers.

While this is retroactive narrativization of his career trajectory, Kafū’s suspi-

cion vis-à-vis modernity and its contradictions eventually turned his attention
toward traditional Japanese culture.
On September 13, 1912, General Nogi Maresuke (b. 1849) and his wife
committed suicide, following the Meiji emperor in death. Ōgai learned of
this after the emperor’s funeral proceedings, and in his diary confessed to
feeling “half-incredulous.” With his background in Western learning and
decades-long involvement in the state’s nation-building project, Ōgai was
exploring the problematic relationship between the logic of the nation-state
and the ethical life of the individual in his fiction, such as “Kano yō ni” (As If,
1912) and “Fujidana” (Wisteria Trellis, 1912) in the Gojō Hidemaro cycle.
Nogi’s death profoundly affected Ōgai, prompting him to compose the
historical narrative “Okitsu Yagoemon no isho” (The Last Testament of
Okitsu Yagoemon, 1912), conceived in form as the posthumous testimony
of a retainer who commits suicide at his master’s death. The narrative reveals
Ōgai’s negotiating his sympathies for Nogi.
From the perspective of Western-inflected Meiji rationalism, General
Nogi’s suicide was an anachronistic aberration. Ōgai could accept that the
personal relationship between Nogi and the Meiji emperor was complex, but
in Nogi’s death Ōgai perceived a sublation of the contradictions endemic to
the modern regime of rational skepticism, effected by the feudal ethics of
bushidō, which stipulated fealty and its prerequisite self-abnegation. Within
the framework of the historical narrative, Ōgai would continue to explore the
implications of this dilemma, in “Abe ichizoku” (The Abe Family, 1913),
“Gojiingahara no katakiuchi” (The Vendetta at Gojiingahara, 1913), “Sakai
jiken” (The Sakai Incident, 1914), “Yasui fujin” (Madam Yasui, 1914), “Sanshō
dayū” (Sanshō the Steward, 1915), “Saigo no ikku” (The Final Line, 1915), and
“Takasebune” (Down the Takase River, 1916).
In producing his historical fictions Ōgai amassed Edo period military
household almanacs (bukan), and became acquainted with Shibue Chūsai

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(1805–58), a late Edo scholar of applied philology (kōshōgaku) and the subject
for Ōgai’s eponymously titled Shibue Chūsai (1916). Relying on documents
procured from Chūsai’s descendants, Ōgai meticulously relates the Tsugaru-
born doctor’s biography and the fate of his house. Ōgai also acknowledges his
private sympathies: “Chūsai traveled the same path as I . . . If Chūsai were my
contemporaine, our sleeves would undoubtedly have brushed together in
some alley.” Ōgai would subsequently write many more biographical
accounts of Edo period Confucian scholars, such as in Izawa Ranken (1916)
and Hōjō Katei (1916).
Regarding this corpus, Ōgai was equivocal: “It is still unclear to me why
my modern intellect would impose a genealogical tendency on the denki
(biography) genre” (Nakajikiri); and elsewhere: “no matter how much one
expands the notion of the novel, my narratives would not be called novels”
(“Kanchōrō kanwa,” Idle Chatter from the Kanchōrō Residence, 1917).
Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941), touching on the famous 1891 “Botsu-risō” (Absence
of Ideals) debate between Ōgai and Tsubouchi Shōyō, has argued that Ōgai’s
position helped institutionalize modern Japanese literature by introducing a
perspectival frame based on a single vanishing point, but Ōgai’s denki,
radically diverging from the novel form, no longer conformed to this
paradigm.
Kafū, for his part, had completely immersed himself in his Edo-oriented
aesthetics by the early years of Taishō, retiring from teaching in 1916. Along
with essays such as Hiyori geta (1915), which traces the author’s perambula-
tions through the old city’s “back alleys and side streets,” or Edo geijutsuron
(1920), a critical treatise on ukiyo-e prints, Kafū wrote several novels informed
by these aesthetic concerns. These include Ude kurabe (Geisha in Rivalry,
1916–17), which sensuously depicts the lives and loves of geisha in the
Shinbashi pleasure quarters, and “Ame shōshō” (Quiet Rain, 1922), the elegiac
tale of a generation forsaken by the modern age. Additionally, on September
16, 1917, Kafū made the first entry in his extended diary Danchōtei nichijō
(Gut-Wrenching-House), which he would continue until his death.
The May 5, 1926 entry responds to Ōgai’s Shibue Chūsai:
Stayed up late into the night reading Mr. Mori’s life of Shibue Chūsai. Mr.
Ōgai’s writing in this history promises to establish a new standard. Not only
is the prose highly detailed and powerful, the style is marked by an exquisite
antiquity, each word and phrase replete with implication. The vernacular
style is of its own accord fully realized, and stands for the first time on equal
footing with the classical language.

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Kafū’s comments could apply to his own Danchōtei nichijō, chronicling as it

does the minutiae of a modern intellectual’s life, in contrast to Ōgai’s
historical reconstruction. Kafū, inspired by Ōgai’s example, composed
Shitaya no hanashi (Shitaya Story, later Shitaya sōwa [Shitaya Gleanings],
1924), detailing the careers of his maternal grandfather Washizu Kidō and
other late Edo kanshi poets.
Let us return to the literary watershed of 1910. The second incarnation of
the journal Shin-shichō, inaugurated in September, furnished a platform for
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s early works, such as “Shisei” (The Tattooer, 1910) and
“Kirin” (Kylin, 1910), which exuded sensational and lurid energy. According
to the autobiographical Seishun monogatari (Tales of My Youth, 1932–3),
Tanizaki “felt antipathy for Naturalist literature and aspired to bear the
opposition’s standard,” and thus found it difficult to make headway in the
literary world until Kafū’s Amerika monogatari. Tanizaki, having suffered a
bout of neurasthenia, was convalescing at a friend’s country house when he
encountered Kafū’s collection: “I felt a proximity, as though my literary
blood-brother had made his appearance. Should I manage to make my
debut, I thought to be recognized first by none other than this – imagining
the arrival of such a day, I indulged in fantasizing.”
The following year, Tanizaki published “Shōnen” (The Children, 1911) and
“Hōkan” (The Jester, 1911) in Subaru, and in November Mita bungaku carried a
laudatory review by Kafū entitled “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō-shi no sakuhin” (Mr.
Tanizaku Jun’ichirō’s Work) which heaped lavish praise on the young
author: “Tanizaki has broken new literary ground none in our Meiji circle
have attempted or otherwise been able to open . . . Ueda Bin [1874–1916] was
nearly moved to tears on reading Tanizaki’s exquisite work, and Mori Ōgai
asked if ‘the author of “Shisei”’ would be gracing us with his presence. I am
not alone in my adulation of Tanizaki.” Idle daydreams had now seen
realization.
However, as Noguchi Takehiko (b. 1937) discusses in his Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō ron (On Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 1973), at the root of this encounter
between Tanizaki and Kafū was a misapprehension of sorts. In his evalua-
tion of these early works, Kafū noted that Tanizaki would “pluck out the
soul of Edo with his lucid prose,” and that the “totally urban” character of
his writing was to be interpreted as a kind of nativism: “Since Tokyo,
replacing Edo, is the author’s intellectual homeland, his writing is comple-
tely native. As for the importance of possessing a native spirit for the
creation of modern art, those who know the work of Wagner or Ibsen or
Grieg or D’Annunzio are all aware of it.”

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Kafū, having spent five years in America and Europe and possessing an
awareness of the interrelationship between Western civilization and its
historical tradition, had worked toward a rediscovery of Edo, and it was at
this juncture that Tanizaki’s literature, which seemed to take Edo as its
“reality” and its arts as a fountain of vital energy, appeared. However,
Tanizaki would soon turn his back on this “native spirit” and, looking
increasingly westward, attempt to transpose the aesthetic notions explored
in “Shisei” and his other early work onto his own lifestyle. The same month
that Kafū’s review was published, Tanizaki’s “Himitsu” (The Secret, 1911)
appeared in Chūō kōron (Central Review, 1887–), a significant milestone for
any young author. The story’s postscript articulates unequivocally this tran-
sition: “My heart has become ever harder to sate with ‘secrets’ and similarly
tepid diversions, as it seeks out ever more lurid, ever more sanguineous
pleasures.” From its masochistic perversion and pathologically carnal subject
matter, Tanizaki’s Taishō period work came to be christened as “the litera-
ture of the diabolic.”
Dying the year before, Ōgai did not live to witness the terrible destruction of
the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923), which claimed ten thousand lives in a
matter of moments. In the West, the carnage of the First World War had
exhausted the faith theretofore held in human will and reason. Both war and
natural disaster erupted without forewarning, and individual will and reason
were left impotent in their wake. Consequently, the category of the “indivi-
dual” – the nineteenth-century novel’s substrate – began to buckle. As symbo-
lized by Uno Kōji’s (1891–1961) lapse into madness and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s
(1892–1927) suicide, the years intervening between the earthquake and the end
of Taishō traced an epochal shift in modern Japanese letters.
Two important journals began publication the year following the earth-
quake: Bungei sensen (The Literary Front, 1924–32) and Bungei jidai (The
Literary Age, 1924–7). The former operated as the base for the Proletarian
Literature movement, while the latter served as the hub for Yokomitsu
Riichi’s (1898–1947) and Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) New
Sensationism. The Proletarian camp rallied around the teleological neces-
sity of the Marxist historical process, while the New Sensationists sought a
mode of expression suited to their new reality, inspired by the postwar
literature of Europe and its mission to supplant the “logic of reason” with a
“logic of feeling” in the vein of Paul Morand’s (1888–1976) Ouvert la nuit
(1922) or German Expressionism. The Meiji and Taishō literary establish-
ment foundered under this bipartite modernist assault, stagnated, and fell
increasingly silent.

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Tanizaki’s Yokohama residence was destroyed in the fires resulting from

the earthquake, forcing a relocation to Western Japan. Though this was
intended as a temporary move, Tanizaki found himself fascinated by the
region’s cultural traditions and links to the classical literary canon, rooted in
its climate and customs, and would remain there until moving to Atami for
health reasons late in life. Tanizaki soon completed Chijin no ai (Naomi,
1924–5), a thematic culmination of his early work, only to pen Manji
(Quicksand, 1928), written exclusively in the Osaka dialect, followed by
Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles, 1928–9), another crucial turning point.
Tanizaki’s writing in this period, incorporating vestiges of a classical world,
demonstrated similarity to Kafū’s in its critical appraisal of contemporary
civilization.
The father-in-law in Tade kuu mushi, a resident of Kyoto’s Shishigatani
district, keeps a mistress whose tastes and behavior he fastidiously molds to
his traditional standard, and so bears a striking resemblance to Yō in Kafū’s
“Ame shōshō,” who tries to have his mistress learn the Sonohachi-bushi
jōruri style, and even to Kafū himself, discernible in the semi-autobiographi-
cal “Shōtaku” (House for a Mistress, 1912). Moreover, portions of Kafū’s
Ōkubo-dayori (Tidings from Ōkubo, 1913) are congruent with the aesthetics
elaborated in Tanizaki’s In’ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows, 1933):
Looking at recent architecture, or the new residences of wealthy business
men, the trend is to lower the ceilings to eliminate any duskiness in the
Japanese rooms, regardless of its effect on the building’s structure, while the
gardens favor open views at the expense of plants and shrubbery. Still, I cannot
help feeling that Japanese complexions, demeanor, clothing, interior decora-
tion and furniture, do not harmonize when exposed to excessive lighting.

Far from the center of literary activity, Tanizaki could pursue themes that
drew his interest, writing Yoshino kuzu (Arrowroot, 1931), Mōmoku monogatari
(A Blind Man’s Tale, 1931), Bushūkō hiwa (The Secret History of the Lord
Musashi, 1931), Ashikari (The Reedcutter, 1932), and Shunkin shō (A Portrait of
Shunkin, 1933) during this productive time. In stark contrast, Kafū found
himself at odds with many of the major publishing companies, and the target
of infelicitous treatment by the journalistic establishment. In 1931, Kafū
published Tsuyu no atosaki (During the Rains), his first important work in
quite some time, which depicted the florid lifestyle of a Ginza café waitress;
Tanizaki immediately penned a glowing review “Nagai Kafū-shi no kingyō ni
tsuite” (On Mr. Nagai Kafū’s Recent Work) articulating profound under-
standing for Kafū, thus returning the goodwill received at his debut.

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Perhaps encouraged, Kafū composed Bokutō kidan (A Strange Tale from

East of the River, 1937), recounting an affair with a Tamanoi-district prostitute
through narratologically self-referential mise-en-abyme, informed by André
Gide’s (1869–1951) Paludes (1896) and Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925). Kafū’s adop-
tion of an experimental structure resonated with the wider perception that
nineteenth-century realism and the novel it buttressed were no longer viable.
For his part, Tanizaki’s early Shōwa writing adapted elements of the mono-
gatari or classical tale in an attempt to break new ground. His skepticism
about the conventional novel form is evinced in his postscript to Shunkin shō
(A Portrait of Shunkin): “As long as one works in the novel form, the more
deftly one writes the more artificial and false the result.”
Shunkin shō takes the form of a historiographical investigation conducted
by the author-narrator. Curiosity piqued, the narrator visits the grave of the
deceased Shunkin, seeks out surviving acquaintances, and begins reconstruct-
ing her biography, at times doubting the factuality of his materials, at other
times speculating about the various lacunae they present. Structurally bear-
ing strong resemblance to Ōgai’s Shibue Chūsai, Tanizaki’s novel suggests that
the trajectory of Ōgai’s career – shifting ever further away from the rigor-
ously unified perspectival regime of Ōgai’s earlier fiction – was a vector
shared by modern Japanese literary history as a whole. While Ōgai aban-
doned the novel for his reinvention of the historical biography, Tanizaki,
member of the subsequent generation, worked toward a critical dismantling
of the novel through the formal conventions furnished by Ōgai’s historio-
graphy. Ōgai became disenchanted with the modern novel form at the time
Sōseki was composing Meian (Light and Darkness, 1916) and Arishima Takeo
(1878–1923) was writing Aru onna (A Certain Woman, 1919) – a seminal
moment in the maturation of the modern Japanese novel. Tanizaki’s works
in the monogatari mode can be read as gestures against the homogenizing
perspective of the modern novel.
Tanizaki’s next project was a modern translation of the eleventh-century
Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), though the massive undertaking would
not be completed until the end of World War II, when the author restored
passages that had been considered slanderous to the imperial house during
wartime. Also straddling wartime was Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters,
1943–8), which depicted the lives of four daughters of a wealthy Osaka
merchant and their immersion in Kamigata culture. With the war’s end,
Kafū moved to publish his unreleased manuscripts; a renewed receptivity for
the author’s defiant spirit secured him a surge in popularity, but his postwar
material did not demonstrate the brilliance of his earlier work. By contrast,

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Tanizaki’s productive drive and creativity did not wane; he wrote Shōshō
Shigemoto no haha (Captain Shigemoto’s Mother, 1949), reminiscent of a
Heian period picture scroll in its aesthetics, Kagi (The Key, 1956), which
negotiated the shady territory between the artistic and the pornographic,
and Fūten rōjin nikki (Diary of a Mad Old Man, 1961), which boldly depicted
the sexual yearning of an elderly man for his son’s young wife.

(Translated by Charles Woolley)

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Natsume Sōseki and the theory
and practice of literature
michael k. bourdaghs

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) has intrigued scholars and readers for more than
a century, due in large measure to the productive contradictions that drove
his work. He created an indisputably modern literature while appropriating
techniques and practices that predated modernity – whether from Japan,
China, or the West. He wrote highly intellectual works whose heroes
grappled with abstract philosophical dilemmas – even as they walked
through narratives rooted in plebeian melodrama. Sōseki created some of
the darkest works of modern fiction – and some of the funniest. His novels
feature intricately engineered structures, clock-like formations in which
seemingly minor details mesh together with uncanny precision – novels
that nonetheless remain remarkably open-ended and ambiguous.
Born Natsume Kinnosuke, the youngest child of a prosperous family in the
city now called Tokyo, he belonged to the last generation to remember the old
Edo culture as it existed before the drastic changes of the Meiji period. A
superfluous child in a family with five older brothers, Kinnosuke was sent
out for adoption as a baby. But – as he reminisced in Garasudo no uchi (Inside My
Glass Doors, 1915) – he soon returned to his original home when his birth-family
sister discovered the infant sitting unattended among wares for sale in front of
his adoptive family’s store. Kinnosuke was subsequently again adopted by the
Shiobara family, legally changing his name to Shiobara Kinnosuke. When he
was nine, the Shiobaras divorced, and Kinnosuke again returned to live with his
birth family – though he would remain on the Shiobara family registry until he
was twenty-one. Sōseki would use this early history as raw material for his
autobiographical novel, Michikusa (Grass by the Wayside, 1915), and it undoubt-
edly shaped his other fiction, with its frequent depictions of a sense of alienation
that arose not just on urban streets, but also from within the family home.
Kinnosuke progressed through the elite track of the new Meiji educational
system. But he struggled to choose his field of specialization and considered,

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among other possibilities, architecture, English literature, and classical

Chinese studies (he spent several months enrolled at Nishō Gakusha, an
academy for classical Chinese learning). In 1890 Kinnosuke enrolled in the
English Department at the Imperial University in Tokyo, finally settling the
question of his academic specialty. He would go on to produce translations,
letters, and even poetry in English, all attesting to his high level of proficiency
in the language, but he also retained a lifelong ambivalence toward it.
In 1889 Kinnosuke met a contemporary who would have a decisive impact:
the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). Under Shiki’s influence, Kinnosuke
fostered what became a lifelong passion for composing poetry in classical
genres, most notably kanshi (classical Chinese poetry); Sōseki is frequently
declared modern Japan’s greatest kanshi poet. He would practice other forms
associated with traditional literati culture, too, including calligraphy, paint-
ing, and noh chanting. It was soon after Kinnosuke met Shiki that he began
using the pen-name Sōseki.
After graduating from the university in 1893, he taught English at
Matsuyama Secondary School in Shikoku (his experiences there provided
material for his comic 1906 novel Botchan, probably Sōseki’s most popular
work among Japanese readers), and later at the Fifth Higher School in
Kumamoto in Kyushu. In 1900, an unexpected and largely unwanted oppor-
tunity arose: he was selected by the Ministry of Education to be sent to
England for intensive study. The two years Sōseki spent in London were, he
would later write, the unhappiest of his life. He faced isolation, culture shock,
and an apparent nervous breakdown, as well as the death of Masaoka Shiki.
His initial plan to read through the canon of British literature faltered when,
halfway through his stay in London, he came to the devastating realization
that he had no idea what “literature” even was.
This realization became the impetus for his major work as a literary
theorist. He stopped reading literary texts, since “To read literary works to
try to learn what literature was, I believed, was the same as trying to wash
blood with blood” (“Preface” to Bungakuron [Theory of Literature], 1907). In
their place, he launched into an ambitious survey of two rising scientific
disciplines, psychology and sociology. After returning to Japan in 1903 and
taking up a teaching position at Tokyo Imperial University (replacing
Lafcadio Hearn as lecturer on English literature), he used his reading notes
as the basis for a series of university lectures and ultimately for his
Bungakuron.
Bungakuron represents an ambitious attempt to produce a scientific theory of
world literature, valid for all places and all times. Using psychological studies of

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the stream of consciousness by such figures as Lloyd Morgan and William

James, Sōseki produced a new definition of literature. Human culture consisted
of two broad realms, science and literature. Whereas the content of science
could be expressed as F, where F referred to the focal point of consciousness at
any given moment, the content of literature consisted of F + f, where f referred
to the emotional fringes of consciousness. This f indicated not only the
importance of affect in literature, but also the temporal fluidity of the reading
process: the F of one moment of consciousness recedes when a previously
peripheral f shifts from the fringes of consciousness to its focal point, becoming
the new F – only to retreat back to the fringes again (becoming f again) when
another new F emerged in the ongoing wave-flow of consciousness. The
sociological side of the theory arrived when Sōseki claimed that the F + f
formula characterized not only moments of individual consciousness, but also
the shared consciousness or Zeitgeist of a given society.
Sōseki’s use of quantitative language to define literature allowed him to
break with previously dominant discourses of literature – whether the
rhetoric studies of classical Chinese learning or the belletristic and social-
evolutionary modes of Western literary history. In doing so, Sōseki devalued
the role of both morality and aesthetics in literature: both have their place, he
argued, but neither was decisive in determining literary value, which
depended instead on the intensity of feeling that a passage solicited in its
reader’s consciousness. This effect was always partially contingent, because a
reader’s response to a text is historically and culturally determined. This
meant that the literary value of a work would fluctuate across time, so that
someday perhaps even Shakespeare might be forgotten. Sōseki explicitly
rejected the notion that literary history develops along a linear, civilizational
trajectory, arguing that there is no reason why non-Western literatures such
as Japan’s need develop along the same course as Western literature.
While he later spoke disparagingly of Bungakuron, Sōseki would continue
to develop his literary theories in a number of celebrated lectures, including
“Watakushi no kojinshugi” (My Individualism, 1914) and “Gendai Nihon no
kaika” (The Civilization of Present-Day Japan, 1912). But even before the
publication of Bungakuron, he had shifted direction to pursue fiction writing.
In early 1905, he published his first stories: “Rondon tō” (Tower of London), a
semi-autobiographical account of a hallucinatory visit to the titular landmark
that puts into practice many of the psychological theories discussed in
Bungakuron, and Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), a comical piece
narrated in the first person by a nameless cat about daily life in the household
of the (very Sōseki-like) teacher who has adopted him. The latter piece

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proved so popular that Sōseki continued the story, eventually serializing

eleven installments that were subsequently published in book form.
From 1905 to 1907, he published a string of stories and novellas. These often
feature experimental narrative strategies, including the philosophical stream-
of-consciousness narration found in Kusamakura (1906) and the boisterous,
befuddled first-person narrator of Botchan. Sōseki has often been celebrated as
an early master of the genbun-itchi vernacular prose style that emerged as the
norm for modern realism in Japan, but these early stories – with, for example,
a cat standing in as narrator – suggest he was also interested in playfully
bending the dominant forms of literary narration. This experimental bent
carried over into Sōseki’s later novels, which often employ non-standard
devices – such as the epistolary novel form Sōseki knew from his studies of
eighteenth-century British literature. Rather than interpret Sōseki as a master
of modern psychological realism, it often seems more appropriate to see him
as an early modernist, a contemporary of Joseph Conrad and Henry James
(both of whose works he knew).
In 1907, Sōseki shocked the literary world by resigning his elite university
appointment to become editor of the literary page of the Asahi newspaper in
what was then considered the vulgar world of journalism. From this point on,
all of Sōseki’s major works appeared first in serialized form in the Asahi. His
first newspaper novel, the melodramatic Gubijinsō (Poppy, 1907), while
popular with readers and containing many of what would become Sōseki’s
characteristic themes, was a critical failure. After that, however, came a string
of works that would cement Sōseki’s critical reputation in many minds as
modern Japan’s greatest novelist – as well as one of its most popular writers.
The first six of these are conventionally grouped together as if they formed
two trilogies. There is no carryover in terms of story among them, but each
trilogy seems to form a sequence of novels dealing with different stages of
life. Sanshirō (1908) traces in comic fashion the misadventures of its epon-
ymous hero, a country boy thrust into the mysteries of modern urban life as a
student at Tokyo Imperial University, in particular his failed attempts at
romance with the strikingly independent-minded women he meets. In 1909,
Sōseki followed up with Sorekara (And Then), tracing the process by which its
hero, the adult son of an elite Tokyo family, risks his social and familial
position due to his love for the wife of a friend. The novel provides a striking
instance of the romantic triangle narrative – in which two male characters
compete for the affections of a single female – that would appear in many of
Sōseki’s novels and lead later critics to cite René Girard’s theory of mimetic
desire. Recent critics have also noted that in many of these works the

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homosocial relationship between the male rivals sometimes develops such

passionate intensity as to enter the realm of the homoerotic. The depiction of
female characters in these novels has also led to debates over the status of
gender in Sōseki’s works: females are often positioned as veritable objects
whose ownership is disputed between males, yet those same female char-
acters often seem to think and act autonomously, all the while remaining
unfathomable to the male characters.
In 1910 Sōseki published Mon (The Gate), concluding the first “trilogy.” It
tells of Sōsuke and Oyone, a middle-aged couple living a modest life in Tokyo
until their dark past threatens to return and disrupt their tranquility: years
earlier, Sōsuke “stole” Oyone from a friend, and now that friend, living abroad
on the Asian continent, has plans to visit Tokyo and call next door on their
landlord. Including lively passages of third-person, stream-of-consciousness
narration, the novel traces Sōsuke’s spiritual crisis. Mon foregrounds another
theme that has attracted critical attention: the role of empire in Sōseki’s works.
Not only does the past in Mon return by way of semi-colonial Asia, but Oyone
and Sōsuke openly discuss the 1909 assassination of Itō Hirobumi by a Korean
nationalist in Manchuria. Sōseki had visited colonial Korea and Manchuria in
1909 and published a narrative of his journey, Mankan tokorodokoro (Travels in
Manchuria and Korea). Critics point to passages in the travelogue expressing
prejudicial attitudes toward other Asians, while more sympathetic readers cite
passages from it and other works that show Sōseki seemingly troubled by
Japanese imperialism. Sōseki’s refusal of a Doctors of Letters degree from the
Ministry of Education in 1911, for example, is cited as a sign of his growing
distance from the Meiji state and its policies. Sōseki’s works were, incidentally,
widely read by contemporary writers on the Asian continent, including Lu
Xun, Ba Jin, and Yi Kwangsu.
Higan sugi made (To the Spring Equinox and Beyond, 1912), published after
a nearly fatal bout with stomach ulcers, opens the second “trilogy” with
another self-consciously experimental work. As Sōseki remarked in the pre-
face that preceded newspaper serialization, the work consists of a series of
only tangentially related episodes, each capable of standing as a discrete story
but that together form a loose narrative following young Keitarō, as he hears
stories about the tangled lives of people around him, including his friend
Sunaga, trapped in a romantic triangle, and Sunaga’s uncle Matsumoto,
whose young daughter has recently died. In Kōjin (The Wayfarer, 1912–13),
the obligatory romantic triangle is formed between Ichirō, tormented by
fears that his wife Onao might not be faithful to him, and his younger brother
Jirō, whom Ichirō employs to test Onao’s fidelity. The last section of the

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novel introduces a new narrating voice, a friend of Ichirō’s who travels with
him and writes a long letter to Jirō (quoted verbatim) describing the elder
brother’s mental deterioration. As is often the case in Sōseki, the ending
leaves the plot ambiguously open-ended.
Kokoro (1914), Sōseki’s best-known novel in the West, completes the second
trilogy. In the first of its three sections, an unnamed first-person narrator
recalls his encounter as a student with an older man he calls “Sensei,” who
has seemingly withdrawn from the world. Sensei hints that there is a guilty
secret in his past, one connected to his wife Shizu, that explains his present
state. In the middle section, the student returns home to the country after
graduation to tend to his dying father. News of the death of the Meiji
emperor reaches them shortly before the father’s condition worsens. A
long letter from Sensei arrives, confessing his past secret – and announcing
his imminent suicide. The student abandons his dying father as he despe-
rately boards a train to return to Tokyo. (We never learn what happens to
him after that, though critics have pointed to tantalizing hints embedded in
the novel’s first half). Kokoro’s final section, comprising roughly half of its
pages, consists of Sensei’s letter. It details his guilt over having betrayed his
friend K in their student days, when both fell in love with the same woman
(Shizu). K commits suicide, and Sensei blames himself. The letter closes with
Sensei linking his own decision to commit suicide with the emperor’s death,
as well as the ritual suicide shortly thereafter of General Nogi and his wife:
Sensei feels the age he belongs to is passing.
In 1915 Sōseki published the autobiographical Michikusa. In 1916 he began
serializing Meian (Light and Darkness), a long and complex narrative of an
unhappy marriage, in which Sōseki again frequently employed stream-of-
consciousness style narration. His death on December 9, 1916, from the
stomach ulcers that had plagued him for years, left the work unfinished,
though many critics have celebrated it as a masterpiece.
Sōseki’s impact on Japanese literary history goes beyond his own works. In
his role as literary editor of the Asahi, he functioned as an influential gate-
keeper, boosting the careers of numerous young writers. In addition, every
Thursday afternoon he hosted a salon for young writers at his own home,
gathering about him a group of fiercely loyal disciples who would dominate
Japanese letters for decades to come – including Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,
Kume Masao, Nogami Yaeko, Uchida Hyakken, and Abe Jirō, among others.
Sōseki’s contract with the Asahi permitted him to publish his works in book
form after their newspaper serialization, and he used this power in 1914 when
bookseller Iwanami Shigeo approached him about a proposed new

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publishing venture. That year, the new Iwanami Shoten brought out Sōseki’s
Kokoro as its first title, launching one of the most influential publishing houses
of modern Japanese literature.
The early critical reception of Sōseki was dominated by his disciples, in
particular Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966) and Morita Sōhei (1881–1949). Under
their leadership, the first of what would become many editions of Sōseki’s
complete works was published by Iwanami in 1916–19. In their criticism, the
disciples stressed the ethicality of Sōseki’s literature – and of Sōseki himself,
celebrating his motto of sokuten kyoshi (follow heaven, abandon self). This
version of Sōseki came under radical assault in 1956, when the young critic
Etō Jun (1932–99) published his first major study of the author, rejecting
earlier hagiographical models for a more critical approach. Another major
turning point in Sōseki’s reception came in the 1970s and 80s, when a new
generation of critics – including Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941), Komori Yōichi
(b. 1953), and Ishihara Chiaki (b. 1955) – published influential new interpreta-
tions that again transformed Sōseki. No longer the hero of the modernization
of Japanese literature, he was now celebrated as the first great critic of
Japanese modernity.

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 66
A new era of women writers
joan e. ericson

In the first years of the twentieth century – the final years of the Meiji era
(1868–1912) – women confronted a host of restrictions imposed by the newly
constructed “family system,” yet the profound social transformations in
education, urbanization, and even the organization of work and home,
created new terrains for women as both readers and authors. The ideology
of the Meiji family, embodied in the Civil Code (1898) and expressed in the
slogan ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), codified Neo-Confucian ideals
of female domesticity, passivity, and sacrifice, and extended patriarchal
samurai practices to families of all classes. Limitations on women’s freedoms,
including a ban on attending public meetings or joining political associations,
mirrored de jure powerlessness in the family, where women lacked control
over property or, in divorce, a claim on their children. However, even by the
end of the nineteenth century, educated women writers plumbed the bound-
aries of their domestic box, notably in the constraints inherent in marriage.
The struggles of their protagonists reflected elusive ideals of romance, of
equitable partnerships in the katei (home), and of aspirations for female
autonomy, if not equality.
Among the most profound social changes by the first decade of the
twentieth century was a near universal literacy for young women, and the
expansion of opportunities for higher education in urban centers. The efforts
of privileged, predominantly male, social reformers established a series of
institutions of higher learning for women, and venues such as Jogaku zasshi
(Women’s Education Magazine) that championed women’s writing. Male
mentors were crucial for the publication and visibility for a succession of
women writers. Yet these mentors often imposed their own expectations on
how a woman should write, and male critics routinely inflicted crude
gendered stereotypes on a writer’s style and language. Overshadowing the
debate on literary styles was a much more extensive discourse on women,
driven largely, if unobtrusively, by the shifting gendered dynamics of

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everyday life. The organization of the home, housework, and the socializa-
tion of children, as much as increasing opportunities for work and higher
education, were in flux and subject to exhaustive, if not always far-reaching,
reappraisals of the place of women. Women were not only the subject of this
discourse, but also a significant part of the audience, with increasing disposal
income. In response to this market, a number of commercially successful
female-focused magazines were launched in quick succession – Fujin gahō
(Ladies’ Pictorial, 1905), Fujin no tomo (Ladies’ Friend, 1906), Fujin sekai
(Ladies’ World, 1906) – along with more short-lived literary venues, such as
Joshi bundan (Women’s Literary, 1905) or the political (socialist) Sekai fujin
(Women of the World, 1907).
Commercial magazines ostensibly appealed to the urban educated wife
responsible for maintaining a nuclear household, most commonly employing
a confessional style (kokuhaku) on domestic affairs, though the readers
included many single working women and girls in higher schools. At the
heart of the most notable stories and essays written by women in this era was
the fundamental question “How should a woman live, and how should a
woman write?” Nogami Yaeko’s (1885–1985) “Kaki-yōkan” (Persimmon
Sweets, 1908), published in the prestigious literary journal Hototogisu
(Cuckoo) associated with Natsume Soseki’s Thursday Club, presents a com-
plex, layered appraisal of what a marriage might mean through a humorous
sketch. A graduate of the Meiji Women’s School, a progressive institution
that did not recite the Imperial Rescript on Education, Nogami addressed the
common Meiji experience where an unwanted but unavoidable marriage
equaled social death. Nogami’s unexpected plot twists, only slowly revealed,
with their veracity always in doubt, depict a woman’s capacity – leaving a
marriage, leaving secular life – to defy the most strictly policed proprieties
and control her own life.
Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945) published a succession of stories: “Ikichi”
(Lifeblood, 1911) in the feminist journal Seitō (Bluestocking), followed by
“Seigon” (The Vow, 1912) and “Onna sakusha” (A Woman Writer, 1913) in
the mainstream literary journal Shinchō, that depict, respectively, the psycho-
logical dislocation following a forced loss of virginity, the disenchantment of a
marriage propelling escalating recriminations, violence, and the prospect of
divorce, and a writer racked with self-doubt, indecision, and marital discord.
Tamura, influenced by the shingeki (new theater) and the New Woman
exemplified by Ibsen’s Nora, achieved remarkable notoriety with her award-
winning novel “Akirame” (Resignation, 1911) which was serialized in the Asahi
newspaper. Her depictions of the frissons of sexuality and collisions between

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the sexes received considerable critical scrutiny and acclaim in special issues of
Shinchō (New Tides, 1913) and Chūō kōron (Central Review, 1914); by her late
twenties, she was the most celebrated woman writer of the era. Yet Tamura’s
portrait of an irresolute artist was unflattering; her writer was indecisive and
petty, codependent in a dysfunctional marriage. Tamura’s writing, her explora-
tion of conflicted intimacies in a vernacular style, would pass out of critical
favor after she left Japan for Canada in 1918 following her lover.
The unabashedly feminist journal Seitō (1911–16), founded by Hiratsuka
Raichō (1886–1971) along with four other Japan Women’s College graduates,
exemplified the direct challenge to constraints of conventional morality embo-
died in the media-grabbing slogan “New Woman.” Raichō’s 1911 manifesto,
from the inaugural issue, opened with the striking declaration: “In the begin-
ning, woman truly was the sun . . . now she has become the moon – shining by
the light of others, dependent on others for a living, a moon whose face is as
pale and ashen as an invalid’s.” Raichō’s lengthy, lyrical manifesto was a clarion
call to women to recover authenticity and participate in a broadly conceived
creative project to manifest hidden female Genius that was in all women. Seitō
initiated a series of highly contentious public debates on chastity, abortion, and
prostitution. Raichō’s defense of the “New Woman” (1913), published in Chūō
kōron, embraced, unreservedly, the term for herself and her project, to free
women from sexist mores, from hypocritically gendered, or even from self-
doubt. The New Woman may have been better known as a figure of scandal or
the subject of scorn – notably from well-known educators such as Shimoda
Utako (1854–1936) or Naruse Jinzō (1858–1919) – yet the wide diversity of
feminist perspectives and literary styles in Seitō changed the basic presumptions
of what a woman would write or read.
The oldest and the youngest authors published in Seitō are indicative of the
range of its New Woman discourse, even as they illustrate its limits in the face
of implacable institutional reaction. Fukuda Hideko’s (1865–1927) “Fujin
mondai no kaiketsu” (The Solution to the Woman Question, 1913) presents
the most sweeping indictment of the limits of women’s rights, or liberation,
without a communal system, with “equal welfare of all,” including both men
and women. A veteran of the Jiyū minken undō (Freedom and People’s Rights
movement), the 1885 Osaka Incident, and the founding of the socialist journal
Sekai fujin, at forty-eight Hideko was a generation older than the other
feminists of Seitō. Her “Solution” highlighted the centrality of class inequal-
ities, even as it invoked a utopian, pre-industrial era. The article, most
probably, provoked a ban of the entire issue for being “disruptive of public
peace and order.” Itō Noe (1895–1923) who, at age twenty, would succeed

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Raichō as editor, questioned even more sharply the prevailing social prac-
tices, translated articles by foreign feminists such as Emma Goldman, and
condemned sanctimonious charity and narrow-minded morality. Itō’s
“Atarashiki onna no michi” (The Path of the New Woman, 1913) employs
dramatic, repetitive language to celebrate the courage of such pioneers and
exhort them to continue their struggles: like Raichō, her path is not so much a
political platform with specified goals as an emotionally charged expression
of commitment. Her short story “Wagamama” (Willfulness, 1913), one of her
sixty-something contributions, depicts a young woman forced to return
home to Kyushu for an arranged marriage, and the courage required to
stand up for the life she desired. Her story closely mirrored her own
experiences, fleeing a first marriage to join Tsuji Jun (1884–1944), a writer
and translator who was her teacher from Ueno Girls’ School; two sequels
would trace the unraveling of her relationship with Tsuji. Itō would later be
publicly involved with an older married man, Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), whose
fellow socialist-activist lover, Kamichika Ichiko (1881–1981), created further
scandal by stabbing him in the neck in 1916. On September 16, 1923, long after
the journal had ceased publication, Ôsugi and Itō, still unmarried, raising
seven children, and continuing to work as activist organizers in a working-
class district, were murdered by the police.
Over the course of the interwar period, a new generation of women
writers achieved considerable popularity and notoriety, with readership
sufficient to support their literary careers that, for many, continued in the
decades following the Pacific War. Yet most female authors confronted
critical condescension that categorized much of their work as joryū bungaku
(women’s literature) and that, if not explicitly disparaging, effectively segre-
gated it from the modern canon. Critics assumed that “women’s literature”
referred to a specific literary style – principally characterized by sentimental
lyricism and impressionistic, non-intellectual, detailed observations of daily
life. A few women, such as Miyamoto (née Chūjō) Yuriko (1899–1951), were
treated as “masculine” exceptions. Her first publication, “Mazushiki hitobito
no mura” (A Flock of the Poor, 1916) in Chuō kōron, portrays the misery of
tenant farmers, as seen by a privileged, if well-meaning, schoolgirl from the
city. The calculated cunning of the impoverished trying to change their own
desperate circumstances first induces revulsion in the protagonist, followed
by a more skeptical and nuanced appraisal of her own motives for trying to
help others. The tone is more cautionary and the description of social
conditions more analytical than in many works of “women’s literature”
that covered similar experiences.

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In the decade that followed the First World War, amidst accelerating social
change, women’s visibility in urban white-collar jobs – elementary school
teachers, clerks, office workers, telephone operators, waitresses – unsettled
gendered conventions. Single women, working in the tertiary sector, often
migrants to Tokyo and independent of patriarchal families, exercising con-
siderable freedom in dress, comportment and love lives, provoked fierce
condemnation from conservatives. We should note that for most women this
realm of freedom was outside their experience: the vast majority of adult
women (over 85 percent) were not in the paid workforce, and nearly three-
quarters of those who worked were in manual labor. Even for educated
women, discriminatory restrictions in employment were inescapable, as
were the limitations of their sex-segregated second-rate education. Yet the
freedoms of a relatively few women were widely represented in popular
culture, culminating in the image of the modan gāru (modern girl) or moga,
most often depicted as a decadent libertine, independent, adventurous,
shameless, an icon of the era that incurred much ire.
Yosano Akiko’s (1878–1942) “‘Onnarashisa’ to wa nani ka” (What Is
‘Womanliness’?, 1921), published in Fujin kōron (Ladies’ Review), indicts
hide-bound male conservatives who championed what they claimed were
time-honored, fast-disappearing feminine ideals of love, refinement, and
modesty. Already renowned as a tanka poet for Midaregami (Tangled Hair,
1901), Yosano had become a prolific public intellectual on a wide range of
women’s issues. She advocated full gender equality in education and work,
and characterized “motherhood” (read, parenting) as a jointly shared project.
For Yosano, the goal was to improve the “humanness,” the best, admired
traits regardless of gender, and cut through the cant justifications of gender
privilege. Few would follow Yosano’s utopian ideals, but in a period of
relative political moderation, reactionary outrage had limited impact in
reining in the burgeoning print culture: outré women were good copy.
By the mid 1920s, the diversity of women’s experiences and aspirations
were a commonplace in the shifting media landscape that now included not
only widely read newspapers and a broad array of mass-marketed magazines,
but also movies and radio. Reflecting broader global dynamics, women were
represented not only as significant subjects of endless reportage, analysis, and
marketing, but also as agents, redefining their roles and expressing their
voices, especially in the rapidly expanding market niche of fujin zasshi
(women’s magazines). A proliferation of new mass-marketed women’s
magazines – Fujin kōron (1916), Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Friend, 1917),
Fujin kurabu (Ladies’ Club, 1920), Fujo kai (Women’s World, 1920), Ie no hikari

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(Light of the Family, 1925) – and regular coverage of their contents in daily
newspapers brought women’s perspectives, albeit limited in reference
to “women’s spheres,” to the attention of a broad, increasingly educated
public. Social surveys from 1920s Tokyo suggest that most women working
in white-collar jobs were avid subscribers. But critics commonly disparaged
these magazines as catering to the fantasies of housewives or housebound
middle-class daughters. Women’s education expanded the pool: higher
school graduates constituted 10 percent of their age cohort in the general
population. Maeda Ai has argued that these graduates were the core reader-
ship of women’s journals.
The mass-marketed women’s magazines recast income opportunities for
all writers, male or female, though the majority of literary works published in
their pages were by men or were anonymous. Their commercial success
enabled them to bid up the price for submissions and to pay writers sig-
nificantly more. Yet in the view of critics like Ōya Sōichi (expressed in 1926),
this popular writing only debased the value of literary works, unleashing a
flood of “slipshod works.” In 1928, the established female playwright
Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941) founded Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Arts) to
showcase literature by women, and as a distinct departure from other
women’s magazines. The writers whose work appeared in the first issue
did not share a common literary style, ideology, or educational background,
unlike the coterie journals of their male counterparts. It distinguished itself by
a serious intellectual quality and an explicitly feminist orientation: all articles
written or translated by women. In an interview with Setouchi Harumi
(Jakuchō), Enchi Fumiko (1905–86) later described how Hasegawa had
attempted to include a diverse collection of forms, styles, and themes,
encouraging contributors to try new approaches: Enchi attributed both her
own drama Banshun sōya (Late Spring Evening of Merriment, 1928) and
Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903–51) shift from poetry to the prose of Hōrōki (Diary
of a Vagabond, 1928–30) to Hasegawa’s influence.
The women depicted in Nyonin geijutsu were a far cry from the “docile
dolls” Yosano Akiko had decried, and writers were celebrated for their
representation of women as active agents, warts and all. Nakamoto
Takako’s (1903–99) “Suzumushi no mesu” (The Female Bell-Cricket, 1929)
was singled out in the Asahi newspaper series on “Recent Women Writers”
by the critic Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968) for its exemplary portrait of “female
malice.” Nakamoto’s female protagonist, impoverished and struggling in the
margins of the city, exudes only contempt for the self-sacrificing kindness of
her partner. Her exploitative bullying punishes with cool indifference.

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Hayashi Fumiko’s Diary of a Vagabond (1928–30) launched an especially

prominent and prolific literary career that often focused on her impoverished
beginnings. Her diary offered a perspective from below that was considered
authentic, a depiction not so much of desperation as of the dogged determi-
nation and capacity for self-delusion of those who live on the margins.
Despite increasingly strict scrutiny from censors from the early 1930s,
women writers continued to probe the inherent inequalities of sexual poli-
tics. Sata Ineko’s (1904–98) “Crimson” (1936) depicts an unhappy, unstable
marriage that highlighted the limits of shared political convictions. Sata had
achieved initial recognition through her autobiographical account of
exploited child labor in “Kyarameru kōjō kara” (From the Caramel Factory,
1928), published in Puroretaria geijutsu (Proletarian Art), and continued poli-
tical writing and communist affiliation in the face of state repression. Yet her
portrait of humiliation at her husband’s infidelities suggested that the pro-
mise of radical equality in politics did not apply to sexual double standards.
Uno Chiyo’s (1897–1996) “Mohō no tensai” (A Genius of Imitation, 1936)
presents a straightforward account of the events in her life that influenced her
to be a writer, mostly leading up to the publication of her story “Haka o
abaku” (To Open a Grave, 1921) in Chūō kōron. Readers were far more likely
to be familiar with her recent Iro zange (Confessions of Love, 1935) based on
the messy love life of the painter Tōgō Seiji, her former husband, including a
comically detailed and detached description of his well-known failed love
suicide in 1929. Uno depicts a woman writer’s identity through a succession of
male affiliations, seeing the world through his eyes, adopting his tastes and
styles, as a part of trying to be a “good wife.”
Through the shifting social dynamics of the interwar period, many women
writers came to be widely read. In certain ways, the experiences of these
successful writers mirrored the broader trends in politics (tending leftist, then
widespread apostasy), aesthetic tastes (naturalism and confessional fiction)
and, in particular, print culture, where mass-market monthlies and daily
newspapers provided outlets beyond the control of the literary establish-
ment, often transforming writers into celebrities who were expected to
provide their avid fans with myriad details about their personal lives. The
categorization of their work as “women’s literature” misled in its inability to
capture both what was specific to the work and the wide range of styles and
themes to which it was applied. Yet most women also wrote with a “double
vision,” engaged in a variety of modernist trends and always acutely aware of
the gendered dynamics that shaped the world of their characters, as much as
it shaped their own.

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 67
Literary marketplace, politics, and
history: 1900s–1940s
hideo kamei and kyoko kurita

This chapter highlights three main developments in Japanese literature in the

first half of the twentieth century. First, it examines changes in the literary
marketplace. With improvements in publishing and distribution, as well as a
rise in literacy rates, what sorts of readership developed, how did publishers
try to cater to them, and what sorts of writers emerged? Second, it looks at
the formation of the canon of “pure literature” (jun bungaku), together with
the emergence of competing standards, including nationalism and Marxism-
Leninism. Third, it analyzes a series of embroilments between literature and
politics, and the impact they had on historical interpretation.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, large-scale book distri-
butors appeared, building a nationwide distribution network for a retail
market that supplanted the old book-lending and book-exchange systems.
As railroad transportation proliferated during the 1890s, the large publishers,
which had wholesale as well as retail capabilities, sold not only their own
publications but also books purchased from other publishers to retail book-
stores in cities large and small, nationwide. Two publishers – Jitsugyō no
Nihonsha and Hakubunkan – made a breakthrough in increasing sales, using
contrasting but equally effective methods.
Jitsugyō no Nihonsha began operations in 1897 with a magazine, Jitsugyō no
Nihon (Industrial Japan, 1897–2002), which attracted a loyal readership. They
also started Fujin sekai (Ladies’ World, 1906–33), Nihon shōnen (Japanese Boys,
1906–38) and other popular magazines aimed at various market segments.
They quickly expanded by commissioning large retailers outside Tokyo to
sell those magazines on their behalf, and by offering a favorable returns
policy on unsold copies. Hakubunkan also began operations with the pub-
lication of a magazine, Nihon taika ronshū (Collected Essays by Renowned
Authors of Japan, 1887–94). They established themselves firmly by publishing
war-oriented periodicals during wartime: Nisshin sensō jikki (Authentic
Records of the Sino-Japanese War, August 1894–January 1896) and Nichiro

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sensō jikki (Authentic Records of the Russo-Japanese War, February 1904–

December 1905). After these successes, they continued to launch new jour-
nals: a general-interest magazine, Taiyō (The Sun, 1895–1928); Shōnen sekai
(Boys’ World, 1895–1934) for young readers; and a literary magazine, Bungei
kurabu (The Literary Club, 1895–1933). Eventually they became the largest
publisher in Tokyo. While each issue of Nihon taika ronshū sold about 9,000
copies, Nisshin sensō jikki sold over 65,000 copies per issue. War offered a
great opportunity for the mass media to boost circulation. The enormous
success of Nisshin sensō jikki had a coat-tails effect on other Hakubunkan
magazines: the first issue of Taiyō, which later became the publisher’s flagship
journal, sold more than 80,000 copies, and maintained sales of over 50,000 per
issue thereafter. It was an amazingly high figure for the time, and distribution
was supported by a large number of retailers.
The largest publisher in Japan today is Kōdansha. It started up in 1910 as
Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha (hereinafter DNYK). In his inaugural address,
founder Noma Seiji supplied the motto, “When eloquence declines, justice
also declines. Eloquence is the light of society.” Accordingly, the publisher’s
maiden enterprise was a magazine on public speaking and debate, called
Yūben (Eloquence). The kōdan (storytelling) part of the company’s identity is
at least as important as yūben, harking back to a traditional performance art
that gained popularity in Meiji as oral “stories” that were recited even in rural
settlements. Realizing that this could be developed as a new niche market, in
November 1911 DNYK launched the magazine Kōdan kurabu (Kōdan Club,
1911–46; 1949–62). This proved such a success that it was soon challenged by
competitors such as Kōdan sekai (The World of Kōdan, 1912–23), and sales
dropped. Such magazines were competing not only for the same audience,
but also to secure the services of the same kōdan masters and specialized
stenographers. DNYK responded to this crisis by circumventing both masters
and stenographers: they employed established journalists such as Hasegawa
Shin (1884–1963) and inexperienced but talented writers such as Yoshikawa
Eiji (1892–1962), to write new kōdan stories. The stories were welcomed by
readers, and sales of Kōdan kurabu improved.
In 1923, right after the Great Kantō Earthquake, DNYK swiftly published
the photojournalistic book Taishō daishinsai daikasai (The Great Earthquake
and Fire of the Taisho Period), selling 400,000 copies. In January 1925, they
launched the monthly magazine Kingu (King, 1925–57), which had a triple
focus: entertainment, spiritual development, and social advancement. It was
an instant hit, the debut issue selling 740,000 copies, an unprecedented
number in Japanese publishing history. Its success was due to the fact that

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it was accepted as a “family” (katei) magazine, appealing to three generations

at once. Urban companies and factories named it as their recommended
reading; in the rural areas, young men’s and women’s social groups kept
issues of Kingu in their meeting places; even the military designated it as the
only approved popular magazine. Within a year of its debut, circulation had
reached one million.
In Japan, mass literacy owes its start to the Meiji government’s inaugura-
tion of a public educational system in 1872. Primary education was compul-
sory, though at first there were no coordinated curricula, textbooks, or even
teachers. Little by little the institutions took root, creating the basis for a mass
readership, and also providing literary fodder for teachers-turned-writers. By
1902, primary school attendance rates had risen to 90 percent. The number of
primary school teachers rose from about 60,000 in 1893 to over 100,000 in
1902, and to 150,000 in 1919. In that process, provisional teachers were
replaced by young graduates of the newly established normal schools.
Hakai (Broken Commandment, 1906) by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) and
Inaka kyōshi (Country Teacher, 1909) by Tayama Katai (1872–1930), two
representative stories about young teachers, reveal much about the literacy
and literature of this period.
The protagonist of Tōson’s Hakai hides his identity as a burakumin, a
descendant of outcastes who had lived in restricted areas during the Edo
period, and against whom deep-rooted prejudice remained in Meiji Japan.
He becomes a teacher at an elementary school in a small mountain village
but is distressed by instances of prejudice and discrimination against buraku-
min, as well as by the principal’s insidious authoritarianism. He finally con-
fesses his outcaste identity in front of his students, resigns from his teaching
position, and leaves for Texas in search of a new life. Hakai won critical acclaim
as a novel that grappled seriously with social injustice. In Katai’s Inaka kyōshi,
the protagonist is from a family so poor he cannot afford to enter even a public
secondary school. He nonetheless manages to become a substitute teacher at
an elementary school in a farming village in the northern Kantō region. Feeling
isolated, he finds solace in the world of literature, but his health is destroyed by
tuberculosis, and he dies young. He draws his last breath quietly as he listens to
the cheerful commotion of a lantern parade outside, celebrating a military
victory against Russia at Liaoyang in China. In a serene tone Katai deliberately
contrasts this celebratory atmosphere with the tragic fate of a nameless young
soul who accomplished nothing at a significant historical juncture.
Both Katai and Tōson chose to write about a young man in a rural town or
village surrounded by the mountains, and they both depicted the beauty of

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the natural environment. The way these works pictured the fresh, unspoiled
atmosphere of the countryside was widely appreciated, as was the celebration
of local characters. Both Hakai and Inaka kyōshi were commended as among
the best fruits of the Naturalist movement, which swept the nation around
the turn of the century; literary histories have followed suit. But in emphasiz-
ing the opposition of individual versus society, this canonization tends to
overlook the role of the developing publishing industry and distribution
system.
Katai’s Inaka kyōshi actually describes an exceptionally favorable reading
environment. The young protagonist is surrounded by literature-loving
classmates at his junior high school, and the head priest of the rural temple
where he finds lodging turns out to have been active in some literary move-
ment when he lived in Tokyo as a young man. The reality was closer to what
one would infer from the opening of Tōson’s Hakai: few bookstores in
farming or fishing villages and limited rural literacy. The protagonist in
Hakai had studied at a normal school, where he learned the virtue of
aspiration and developed a thirst for knowledge. After graduation, he had
gone off to a remote region with no intellectual atmosphere to take a post as a
primary school teacher. One day at a newly opened “magazine store” he finds
a copy of a book titled Zangeroku (Confessions) by a social activist who is
fighting discrimination against burakumin. It is from then that the young
man’s own mental agony ensues. In other words, the plotline of Hakai hinges
on the emergence of a “magazine store” in a small, isolated town in the
middle of the mountains in Nagano prefecture.
The only other people who had the habit of reading books in those villages
were meibōka (local notables), meaning wealthy landowners or practicing
doctors. They obtained books by looking through newspaper advertisements
and sending in their orders to be delivered by mail. That was the kind of
intellectual environment in which young teachers more typically found
themselves. They could not afford to purchase books freely, so they would
find a few like-minded colleagues to split the cost of a book. Recent scholar-
ship has revealed the existence of numerous book clubs all over the country
with names such as Shoseki Kōdoku Kai (Book Reading Society) and Zasshi
Dōmei Kōdoku Kai (Magazine Reading League).1
Unlike the passive readers of kōdan books and Kingu magazine, the readers
of Hakai and Inaka kyōshi had such a high level of literacy that they could
1
See several studies by Nagamine Shigetoshi, e.g. “Dokusho kokumin” no tanjō (Tokyo:
Nihon Editā Sukūru Shuppanbu, 2004); also Wada Atsuhiko, Media no naka no dokusha
(Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō, 2002).

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become writers themselves at any time, if they were so inclined. And indeed,
a large number began to do just that. It is remarkable that the vast majority of
the novels and memoirs by those now-forgotten teacher-writers basically
hewed to the templates provided by Hakai and Inaka kyōshi, reiterating in
different words the story of a young teacher’s internal conflict, usually
intertwined with some romantic theme. The young teachers were also
participating in a national literacy program, an attempt to use the school
system to inculcate the populace with a “standard spoken language” based on
the speech of educated Tokyoites. The program, which drew heavily on the
writings of Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), a professor at Tokyo Imperial
University, began by teaching teachers-in-training at “humanities colleges”
and at the normal schools. It is not clear how much Tōson and Katai were
aware of such efforts, but their stories about young teachers appeared exactly
at the time when Ueda had envisioned the first fruits of the reform efforts
would be harvested, in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, these works exhibited the colloquial style that was considered
ideal for young teachers to have mastered at secondary schools.
As vernacular literacy increased, a new readership developed, spurred by
readers’ ambitions to make a name for themselves in the new regime. In 1902,
Seikō Zasshisha launched the publication of Seikō (Success, 1902–16) maga-
zine. This illustrates the continuing importance of Meiji Enlightenment
literature, written on the theme of risshi (ambition, aspiration). Ever since
Nakamura Masanao published Saigoku risshi-hen (Tales of Ambition in
Western Lands, 1871), a translation/adaptation of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help
(1859), the term risshi had been broadly popularized, representing the spirit of
self-reliance expressed in the phrase “Heaven helps those who help
themselves.”
The pervasive influence of Saigoku risshi-hen on Meiji youth can be
glimpsed in Kunikida Doppo’s (1871–1908) “Hibon-naru bonjin” (An
Exceptional Common Person, 1903). Doppo depicts with great respect a
friend who was so inspired by Nakamura’s book that he chose to study at a
night school in Kanda (in Tokyo) as he worked during the day, until he finally
achieved his dream of becoming an engineer at an electric lighting company.
If these uplifting stories were popular, it was due to the impoverished back-
ground of so many young people whose families lacked the financial
resources to support them through higher-level schooling. In the course of
the Meiji era, the term risshi had in fact changed its meaning from its more
spiritual or abstract origins, to connote more narrowly and practically the
goals of upward social mobility and financial independence.

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Emigration was an attractive option for some who felt that in Japan their
hard work and perseverance was ultimately useless compared with such
advantages as a college diploma. The only place where they could fully
reap the benefits of hard work alone was in the New World or some other
land of opportunity such as the Japanese colonies. Seeing an opportunity
here, the writer Ogōchi Gokyō published the novel Shokumin ō (The
Emigration King, 1907), and in the same year Seikō Zasshisha ventured into
this genre with Shokumin sekai (The Emigrants’ World), running essays by
powerful politicians such as Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) and Gotō Shinpei
(1857–1929). Critics have often decried what they see as the artificial nature or
the lack of reality of the conclusion of Tōson’s Hakai, in which the protago-
nist leaves Japan for Texas to start a new life. However, emigration was in
fact an attractive and even realistic option for some.
The development of a mass readership is an important premise for under-
standing the impact made by the writers of the Shirakaba (White Birch, 1910–
23) magazine. Shirakaba was originally a coterie journal created by young
graduates of Gakushūin University, a college founded to educate the nobility
and aristocracy. The “Shirakaba school” included such writers as
Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), and Arishima
Takeo (1878–1923).
From the start, literary circles generally regarded Shirakaba with contempt
as the literary hobby-horse of the children of well-off aristocratic families. But
Gakushūin’s student body was hardly homogeneous. In addition to princes of
the blood and wealthy nobles, there were the scions of impoverished aristo-
cratic families, such as Mushanokōji. Shiga Naoya and Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–
1961), who both belonged to the Shirakaba school, were actually from
commoner families. In this dialogical “space” emerged a tendency to find
universality. These writers aspired to embody humanity itself, liberated from
all limitations set by social hierarchy. The Shirakaba writers toyed with the
public’s misperception of them as o-botchan: privileged, easy-going, innocent.
Rather than trying to contradict this image explicitly, they wrote stories
whose titles seemed to celebrate the stereotype, such as Mushanokōji’s
Omedetaki hito (A Happy Simpleton, 1911) and Seken shirazu (Ignorant of the
World, 1912).
In 1916, the Shirakaba satellite magazine Seimei no kawa carried a portion of
Kurata Hyakuzō’s (1891–1943) Shukke to sono deshi (A Monk and his Disciples),
a play based on the life of Shinran (1173–1262), the influential Buddhist priest.
Shinran preached that the only redemption from earthly corruption was
salvation by Amida Buddha. When the whole play was published by

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Iwanami Shoten in book form in the following year, it created a Shinran

boom, opening up a new horizon for reviving Shinran’s doctrines as a
religion of good works, not just faith and salvation. It is not an overstatement
to say that this play’s publishing success laid the foundation for Iwanami’s
financial stability.
Whether colored by religious belief or not, a new literary genre arose
called kyōyō shōsetsu, a type of spiritual Bildungsroman. Mushanokōji’s deep
interest in religious figures was reflected in his Kōfuku-mono (A Happy Person,
1919), written as a memoir of a young member of a religious sect who
recorded his “master’s” lectures and practices. Another Shirakaba school
writer, Nagayo Yoshirō, wrote a memoir-style novel from a more secular
point of view, titled Takezawa-sensei to iu hito (A Man Called Mr. Takezawa,
1924–5). The young male narrator of Nagayo’s novel delineates an ideal man
of sterling character and profound culture. The narrator, who has come to
know him personally, learns from Takezawa’s words and actions, and
improves himself. This appealed to the young intellectuals of the early
decades of the twentieth century, who valued self-cultivation and spiritual
fulfillment. “Awakening” and “new lifestyle,” along with “self-reflection” and
“spiritual cultivation,” were the keywords with which young people of this
period – the first two decades or so of the twentieth century – distinguished
themselves from the previous generations.
These “awakened” youth began to make their mark as not merely con-
sumers of literary publications, but activists or potential activists with a
serious commitment to social issues. Starting in 1918, for example,
Mushanokōji attempted to create a commune he called “Atarashiki mura”
(The New Village). In a separate development, Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–
1960), a Christian-Socialist activist, obtained a wide readership with his novel
Shisen o koete (Overcoming the Crisis of Death, 1920), which questioned the
meaning of “devotion” and “practice.” This was based on many years of
experience doing relief work in the slums of Osaka and became a bestseller of
the same magnitude as Kurata’s Shukke to sono deshi. Kagawa’s realistic
depiction of people struggling with illness and poverty as well as of a
protagonist devoting himself to saving them moved readers’ hearts and
evoked their sympathy. The publisher, Kaizōsha, made enough profit from
it to grow into a large publishing company.
It was Mikami Sanji and Takatsu Kuwasaburō who first used the
term jun bungaku (pure literature), in their Nihon bungakushi (History of
Japanese Literature, 1890); they meant to imply aesthetic literature, as dis-
tinguished from utilitarian works on science, history, and other topics. The

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term jun bungaku, however, started to be used in the second decade of the
twentieth century, when entertainment literature had proliferated and tar-
geted a mass readership at a low level of literacy. Some writers then felt the
need to impress upon the public the distinction between mass literature and
their own autobiographical novels. They started to refer to their own works
as jun bungaku, while they coined a somewhat derogatory term for mass
entertainment literature: tsūzoku bungaku (“common” or popular literature).
The concept of jun bungaku took shape with the genre of the “I-novel”
(watakushi shōsetsu) at its core. In the Shirakaba school the most prominent
exponents of the “I-novel” were Mushanokōji and Shiga. Shiga tried to
construct a fictional universe with his works, and expected the reader to
participate in it. For example, Wakai (Reconciliation, 1917), one of his repre-
sentative works, narrates the protagonist’s tragic loss of a newborn baby to
illness, and follows the troubled relationship between the protagonist and his
father until they achieve reconciliation. How their antagonism originated is
not explained in the novel. Another novel Shiga had published a few years
earlier, Ōtsu Junkichi (1912), is a story about the break-up of a father and a son:
the protagonist falls in love with the housemaid, and wants to marry her; but
because his father opposes their marriage, he moves out of the house. Shiga
wrote Wakai with the assumption that the reader had read his previous
works. Shiga would also implant in one novel references to another novel,
in order to link different stories together. The protagonist of Wakai, for
example, is a novelist, and he recollects the plot of a story he had written
before, which is essentially the plot of Shiga’s own Kōjinbutsu no fūfu (An
Amiable Couple), published earlier in 1917. Shiga assumes that the reader is
familiar with that previous work and expects the reader of Wakai to identify
the protagonist in Wakai as Shiga himself.
For the first two decades of the twentieth century, a number of writers
tried to write about their own lives and about mundane matters of everyday
life. Contemporaries soon came to refer to these works as “watakushi
shōsetsu” (I-novels), a term that has permanently entered the critical lexicon.
In its original usage it was vital that the protagonist himself be a writer of
fiction; that his novels somehow reference the author’s own previous works;
and that there be some mechanism to inform the reader that the protagonist
is identical with the author himself.
Around the time when Shiga Naoya’s literary style was generally accepted
as the canon-setter for pure literature, a group of writers without formal
education emerged. They drew public attention by giving voice to physical
senses and sensations. Miyajima Sukeo (1886–1951), for example, is best

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known for Kōfu (A Miner, 1916), a story about a mining explosives expert. In
his youth, Miyajima had led a vagabond life. Starting with an apprenticeship
at a sugar wholesaler at age thirteen, he hopped from one job to another. He
began to love literature thanks to book lenders and his brother’s personal
library. In 1914, he bought from a street vendor an issue of Kindai shisō
(Modern Thought, 1912–14), an anarchist journal, and this resulted in his
involvement in the Syndicalist Society. Kindai shisō was terminated in 1914 but
then revived under Miyajima’s leadership during 1915–16. And in 1916,
Miyajima made his debut as a fiction writer with the novel Kōfu. Early in
the novel, we read a pleasant description of the natural scenery in the locale
where the story takes place, but then we meet Ishii, the miner, in his hell-
hole. A chilling description ensues of the effects of mining on the mountain
itself, culminating in this passage:
The mountain groaned with pain, its huge body writhing every time dyna-
mite exploded. But the tremendous, resounding echoes of the blast, the
pulverized rock fragments hard as iron, gave Ishii a sense of great excitement
every day.

Using anthropomorphic expressions emphasizing physical sensation,

Miyajima passes from a sense of man’s affinity with Nature to an antagonistic
relationship between the two. We learn later that Ishii is resentful of the
company’s unfairness and exploitation, and also of his fellow workers’
servility. Outside the mine he resorts to liquor and violence to divert his
mind from indignation, getting into a fight with another miner with whom
he was already at odds: at the end of the story, they stab each other to death.
Other novels before Kōfu had depicted harsh workplace environments, but
this was the first to capture the existential angst of a laborer who engaged
Nature directly. His urge to attack something is redirected at Nature, and he
perversely enjoys the thrill of violating her personified “body.” Kōfu was
banned three days after its publication for its “corruption of public morals” in
violation of the Publication Law. Miyajima was forced to eliminate the
problematic passages in order to include it in his collection Urami naki satsujin
(A Murder without Enmity, 1920).
Hayama Yoshiki (1894–1945) also used personification in his metaphorical
expression of the laborer’s mentality in Umi ni ikuru hitobito (The Ocean
Dwellers, 1926).
A steam boat, the Manju-maru, its belly swollen with 3,000 tons of coal,
headed toward Yokohama in the blizzard . . . Giant waves were crashing
beyond the island. The Manju-maru was in the water almost up to her decks.

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With great apprehension, she tried to envision herself among the surging
billows of the Pacific, and she mustered the courage to venture forth. The
bridge commanded her engines to make the utmost speed given her final
stage of pregnancy.
Instead of giving detailed descriptions of a horrific experience, this prosopo-
poeia concretizes the desperate physical and emotional conditions into which
the crew members are drawn. Hayama’s metaphors and similes are out-
landish, even to the point of humorousness, yet they are imbued with the
threat of catastrophe. “The danger to which the ship’s body is exposed, a
danger they themselves share, gives fantastic, superhuman power to the
sailors, just as an old woman suffering from palsy might carry a large stone
mortar out of a house at the time of a fire.” He continues in this vein, leading
the reader to the uprising of the lower-ranking crew members.
Hayama actually had some seafaring in his résumé – stints as an apprentice
seaman on a Calcutta service cargo vessel and as seaman third class on a coal
carrier – in addition to literary studies at the High School Division of Waseda
University and various jobs on land. In 1921 he started working as a journalist
for the Nagoya News, but he was arrested and imprisoned for two months for
participating in a labor dispute he went to cover for the paper. He began
writing The Ocean-Dwellers while he was in prison. Since the government had
not yet issued the Peace Preservation Law (1925), he was even able to receive
a gift copy of Marx’s Das Kapital during his incarceration.
Itō Sei (1905–69) opened up another new horizon with his close historical
and textual analysis of literary language and style. His Shin shinri-shugi
bungaku (The New Psychological Literature, 1932) pointed out that the
literary reforms of modern colloquial-style literature, conducted under the
slogan “write as if speaking,” were better described as “writing based on
conversation.” He argued that such a choice limited fictional narrative to a
linear progression and a predictable pace.
In Itō’s view, the Shinkankaku-ha or New Sensationists, who built on the
experimental work of writers such as Miyajima and Hayama, rightly rebelled
against the presumed objectivity and limited scope of the new colloquial
literature. He praised “Atama narabini hara” (The Head and also the Belly,
1924) by Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) for imparting a sense of unprecedented
narrative speed, which created a refreshing emotional distance between the
text and the reader. However, some critics had regarded this technique as an
excessively straightforward imitation of the rapid, regular succession of
photographs in a simple motion picture: it still lacked psychological depth.
How, then, could one capture modern life in literary language without falling

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into stale, trite rhythms either linguistically or structurally? Could one not
represent several perspectives simultaneously? These are the questions Itō
himself had tried to address creatively in his short story “Kikō no zettai-sei”
(The Tyranny of Structure, 1930). It opens as follows:
When I enter the room, Kubo lifts his head from the microscope, and signals
with his eyes to take a look. He gets up from his chair to let me sit down and
see. Drawn inside a bright, circular space is the map of a cell membrane. An
unfamiliar form. What degree of magnification am I in? Obscenity is flowing out of
all these strange patterns. Indeed, any efficient configuration must necessarily be
obscene. I will explain that to this biologist sometime. I hear Kubo’s voice behind
me. How loud his voice is, speaking over the magnified image of this delicate,
infinitesimal form! The sound of his voice makes these shapes in the liquid
under the glass slide tremble. The vibration of the atmosphere originates in his
jutting larynx. “Isn’t that fascinating? You are looking at the base of a pistil of
some silver-dragon grass, specifically the cross-section of an ovule . . .”

In this scene Itō splices together subjective material – observations evoked by

the microscopic view of an object; the physical perception of sound – with
objective material (description and dialogue) in such a way as to defamiliarize
viewer, viewed, and viewing all at once. He described this technique as one
that allowed him to project “fantasy, memory, desire, grief, joy, and a variety
of images generated in one’s mind by association” but invisible from without.
Tane maku hito (The Sower), a magazine founded by Komaki Ōmi (1894–
1978), Kaneko Yōbun (1894–1985) and others in 1921, supported the Russian
Revolution and promoted the rise of a new genre called “the literature of the
fourth class,” or “working-class literature.” Although the destruction and
chaos attending the Great Kantō Earthquake and Fire of September 1923
obliged Ōmi and his colleagues to end publication of Tane maku hito, in the
following year they made a fresh start with a new magazine, Bungei sensen
(The Literary Front, 1924–32). Then in 1925 they, along with a few others,
founded Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei (League for Proletarian
Literature of Japan). Soon, members of the Shinjinkai (Freshmen Club), a
socialist study group at Tokyo Imperial University, began to join the league:
Hayashi Fusao (1903–75), Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), Kaji Wataru (1903–82),
Kawaguchi Hiroshi (1905–?) and others. These Shinjinkai writers were theor-
ists proud of their intellectual abilities, whereas writers like Miyajima and
Miyachi Karoku (1884–1958) had actual experience working for low wages,
and took a different approach.
In order to resolve the conflicts that emerged between the two factions in
the League, the League’s leading literary theorist, Aono Suekichi (1890–1961),

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wrote a thesis promoting “art based on research.” Aono told writers to seek
literary reality, not in the subjective depiction of daily affairs the way Shiga
Naoya did, but scientifically, based on positivistic social studies. That is the
way to a proletarian literature, a “natural growth” that will produce writers
of the intelligentsia who identify with the proletariat, poets born from
laborers, and farmer-novelists. This framework served Aono as a way to
put Miyajima and Miyachi’s works, as well as the Tane maku hito authors, in
their place. Ultimately the literature emanating naturally from a growing
proletarian class could transform into a true literature for the proletariat only
if each author had a clear sense of purpose guided by the class awareness of
the proletarian leadership.
In 1927, after a series of complex negotiations, Aono, Hayama, Komaki,
and others founded the Rōnō Geijutsuka Renmei (League of Laboring and
Farming Artists), with Bungei sensen as their new organ magazine. In 1928
Hayashi, Nakano, and others founded the competing Zen Nihon Musansha
Geijutsu Renmei (called “Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio” in Esperanto
and known as NAPF or “Nappu”) with their own organ magazine, Senki (The
Battle Flag, 1928–31). Both Bungei sensen and Senki carried a number of works
that even today are considered the best of that era’s proletarian literature.2
In the kaleidoscopic splinterings and realignments of these various move-
ments, Kurahara Korehito (1902–91) emerged as a literary theorist. His major
“thesis” had a pervasive influence: it set the canon among the NAPF writers
for both criticism and creative work. Kurahara had gone to the Soviet Union
in 1925 as a special correspondent for the Miyako shinbun newspaper to study
Russian literature. He returned to Japan in November 1926, and soon became
an influential figure thanks to his thesis, “Marukusu-shugi bungei hihyō no
kijun” (The Criteria for Marxist Literary Criticism, 1927). In it he quotes the
Russian literary theorist Georgii Plekhanov: “The critic’s primary task is to
translate the philosophy of art expressed in an artwork into the language of
sociology, and to discover what one might call the sociological value of
literary phenomena.” Kurahara argued that a “scientific” critical method
would clarify the ideology and social class that a given work represents and
would then analyze the sociological basis for this ideology’s emergence in
modern society. The technical evaluation of relative artistic merit is a
secondary issue.

2
For example, Senki carried Kobayashi Takiji’s (1903–33) Kani kōsen (1929) and Tokunaga
Sunao’s (1899–1958) Taiyō no nai machi (1929). Bungei sensen carried Kuroshima Denji’s Ana
(1928) and Iwatō Yukio’s Gatofu Fusegudaa (1928).

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Just before 1930, a socio-economic phenomenon occurred called the enpon

(one-yen book) boom, whose historical roots go back to the Great Kantō
Earthquake of September 1, 1923. The earthquake and its subsequent massive
fires delivered a tremendous blow to the publishing industry in Tokyo.
Kaizōsha was finding it particularly difficult to rebuild the company. In
1926, as a last-ditch effort, they publicized a new thirty-eight-volume collec-
tion, Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Collected Works of Modern Japanese
Literature), later expanded to sixty-two volumes, to be printed and published
one volume at a time for one yen a volume. They began to take reservations
in the following year, and unexpectedly the number of subscribers quickly
reached over a quarter of a million, and finally 400,000. Observing this
success, Shinchōsha decided to publish Sekai bungaku zenshū (World
Literature Collection; 57 vols.), and obtained more than half a million orders.
Other publishers had similar success: Heibonsha’s Gendai taishū bungaku
zenshū (Modern Popular Literature Collection; 60 vols.), Shunyōdō’s Meiji
Taishō bungaku zenshū (Collection of Meiji and Taishō Literature; 50 vols.,
later increased to 60) and others were able to secure over 200,000 subscribers
each.
The large number of subscribers resuscitated the publishing companies.
All books printed in Osaka after the earthquake sold like hotcakes in Tokyo,
regardless of genre or topic. Moreover, enpon sets offered great value for the
money: one yen for an average of five hundred pages of literature at a time
when a novel less than a third of that length cost about one and a half yen.
Every publishing company published collected works by subscription.
Ordinarily, 20–30 percent of printed books remained unsold. But publication
by subscription allowed them to adjust the number of copies to print, thus
minimizing losses due to overprinting. That in turn made it possible to keep
the price low.
This enpon boom, and the seeming prosperity of the publishing industry,
gave the supporters of the proletarian literary movement a false basis for
understanding their mission. The illusion was created that there were bour-
geois publications and bourgeois writers in a bourgeois market, when there
had been no fundamental growth in economic terms. Based on this miscon-
ception, proletarian literary activists spent much time and energy defining the
essence of proletarian literature, contrasting it with bourgeois literature.
Prompted by their fear that the general audience might be totally engulfed
by the enpon boom, the NAPF writers actively engaged in a debate on the
“popularization of art” (geijutsu no taishū-ka). In “Kaiketsu sareta mondai to
atarashii shigoto” (Resolved Issues and New Tasks, 1928), Nakano Shigeharu

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stated that it was a mistake to be overly concerned about the division of

proletarian art between “true proletarian art” and “art for directly agitating
and propagandizing the masses.” The activist writers’ greatest concern was
not categories of art, but how to lead “the masses.” Art was useful only as a
means of raising consciousness. The Communist Party’s ultimate goal was to
unite the workers in large factories in important industries.
The law that governed publication was the Publication Act of 1893, issued
by the Meiji government, under which the Ministry of Internal Affairs was
concerned with two areas: “disturbance of peace and order,” and “corruption
of public morals.” The sanction often used, hakkin (short for hatsubai kinshi,
prohibition of sale) referred to banning the publisher from selling the work in
question after it had been printed. Such a law did help authorities keep track
of what was being published. But far more troublesome for Communist
writers was the Peace Preservation Law promulgated in April 1925, which
prohibited the founding of associations that “tried to alter the kokutai
(national polity) or to deny the private ownership system.” The penalty for
a violation was up to ten years’ imprisonment with or without forced labor.
The law was originally devised to incapacitate the anarchists, but during the
1930s it was wielded against the Communist Party. The Party had chosen to
exist as an illegitimate entity in order to confront the Peace Preservation Law;
it advocated the abolition of the monarchy and an overthrow of the tennō-sei
(emperor system). Since Senki was a bulletin for a legitimate professional
association of writers, the NAPF, and not officially an organ of the illegiti-
mate Communist Party, the most damage the government could do to Senki
was a prohibition on the sale of a given issue. However, even if Senki was not
an official Communist Party organ, its provision of funds to the Party could
put it in violation of the Peace Preservation Law, and that authorized more
draconian sanctions.
The literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83) studied Marx but was
skeptical of what was known as the Leninist Literary Movement. He
made a debut as a critic with his “Samazama-naru ishō” (A Variety of
Designs, 1929), the year after he graduated from the French Department
of Tokyo Imperial University. Kobayashi’s skepticism established his repu-
tation as the spearhead of anti-Marxist criticism. This makes sense within
the framework persisting even today, which divides the literary scene of the
late 1920s to early 1930s into two opposing groups – the literature of
engagement of the Proletarian Literature movement and the belles-lettres
of the Geijutsu-ha (“Art” school). Yet no one read Marx’s works more
carefully than Kobayashi.

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In “Hitotsu no konponteki-na mondai” (A Fundamental Question, 1930),

for example, Kobayashi refers tellingly to a passage from Marx’s The Poverty of
Philosophy (originally Misère de la philosophie, 1847). In Kobayashi’s view,
Japanese Leninist writers were merely what Marx called “metaphysicians.”
Kobayashi speculates that if one wishes to learn from Marx, one should not
be so concerned with analyzing political or economic situations using logical
categories born out of Marx’s many layers of abstraction; instead, one must
face the reality of one’s own world, just as Marx did. This reasoning led
Kobayashi to the position that journalism, which turns one’s essays and
novels into marketable commodities, is a social mechanism for presenting
theoretical categories as if real. He critiqued both the commercialization of
words, and the Leninist literature that never acknowledged this trap. Thus
Kobayashi established himself as a unique critic, and his analytical prowess
sustained his status as a canonical critic for a long time.
Some Marxist critics approached the phenomenon of the popularization of
art and literature as a matter not of politics but of socio-economics. For
example, the tanka poet/economist Ōkuma Nobuyuki (1893–1977) tried, in
Marukusu no Robinson monogatari (Robinson’s Tale Told by Marx, 1929), to
explain the masses’ reading habits by offering, not exactly the standard
Marxian “allotment” of labor and products, but an analysis of how much
time the masses could afford to “apportion” to different activities. The
analogy was to the efforts of Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, to use
his time wisely.
According to a report prepared by the Research Section of the Social
Affairs Department of the Osaka municipal government, titled “Yoka sei-
katsu no kenkyū” (A Study of Leisure Activities, 1923), Osaka’s residents spent
their leisure time in a variety of ways. As to reading in particular, among 719
survey respondents the number spending their “free time in the evening after
work” on that form of leisure activity was highest in winter (230), and lowest
in summer (169). Those who wanted to read for relaxation after a day’s hard
work naturally preferred to read entertainment, and the time they could
spend on reading must have been between one and two hours. According to
the same report, among 281 female factory workers between the ages of
twenty and twenty-nine, only twenty-one women answered that in winter
they read during their “free time in the evening” after work (exclusively), and
a mere eleven replied that they read on Sundays, holidays, and other off-days
(exclusively). Furthermore, in summer, these numbers dropped by about 50
percent. But among a younger cohort (177 female factory workers between
the ages of fifteen and nineteen) we find that altogether some 30 percent

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spent time in literacy-related activities. Clearly both employers and employ-

ees had begun to understand the necessity of improving literacy.
A survey of 1,323 female factory workers, done in Tokyo in 1921, suggests
that they made their magazine selections on the assumption that they would
eventually become housewives. In this survey, Fujin sekai (Ladies’ World,
1906–33) was by far the most popular, followed by Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s
Friend, 1917–2008) and Fujokai (Women’s World, 1910–52). Fujokai was a
relatively highbrow magazine, but the first two carried practical information
for household management.3 Compared to female factory workers, it is more
difficult to distinguish between housewives’ working hours and free time.
But we do know that, during the 1920s, Shufu no tomo, with its triple motto
(“Instructive, Cultivating, Entertaining”), rapidly increased its circulation
until it became a million-seller along with Kingu in 1934. By 1917, the cumu-
lative number of female high school graduates reached 200,000, and in 1931 it
exceeded a million. Compared to female factory workers, who commonly
held primary school diplomas at most, this new cohort had a higher level of
literacy and higher ambitions. New women’s magazines targeting the profes-
sional woman as a new market began to appear, extolling women’s rights and
liberation. Fujin kōrōn (Ladies’ Review, 1916–) is the most famous of all. A
magazine survey conducted in 1922 with nine hundred professional women
as subjects showed that three magazines – Fujin kōron (196), Fujokai (181), and
Shufu no tomo (144) – competed with each other quite closely, and that the
readership of other women’s magazines lagged far behind.
In the latter half of the 1920s, two female readers of women’s magazines
emerged as two rather different types of writers: Sata Ineko (1904–98) and
Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72). Due to her family’s destitution, Sata Ineko
withdrew from an elementary school when she was in the fifth grade and
started working at a caramel factory. She worked as a maid in a restaurant
and then as a store clerk; she got married, suffered abuse, attempted suicide
three times, got a divorce, and gave birth to a daughter. After her divorce, she
became acquainted with Nakano Shigeharu, a member of the Proletarian
Arts League, began participating in League activities, and wrote “Kyarameru
kōjō kara” (From the Caramel Factory, 1928), a compelling story based on her
childhood experiences. Although it appeared in Puroretaria geijutsu
(Proletarian Art, 1927–8), Sata’s work was unaffected by that journal’s theo-
retical, revolutionary language, and focused simply on the depiction of the

3
See Nagamine Shigetoshi, Zasshi to dokusha no kindai (Tokyo: Nihon Editā Sukūru
Shuppanbu, 1997), 175.

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young girl, who maintained her fresh sensitivity even in a painfully hostile
environment. Soon after Sata’s debut, a new magazine for women’s libera-
tion, Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Arts, 1928–32), started up, offering her more
opportunities to publish her work. She gradually became one of the repre-
sentative writers of the NAPF.
Hirabayashi Taiko was another notable writer who had struggled with
adversity. She came from a rural family of modest means. Over her mother’s
objections, she entered Suwa Women’s High School in Nagano. Immediately
after her graduation in 1922 she moved to Tokyo and became an intern
operator at the Central Telephone Office, only to be fired after two months,
reportedly due to a call she made while on duty to a Socialist activist, Sakai
Toshihiko (1870–1933). She associated with a group of anarchists, and started
living with one of them, Yamamoto Torazō. In 1923, at the time of the Great
Kantō Earthquake, a vicious rumor spread that socialists and Koreans were
scheming to commit arson. Hirabayashi and Yamamoto were arrested by the
authorities and jailed in Ichigaya Prison.
Hirabayashi was released on condition that she leave Tokyo. She and
Yamamoto led a vagabond life in Korea and Manchuria until 1924, when
Yamamoto was arrested in Dalian for lèse-majesté. Hirabayashi gave birth to
a baby girl at a clinic, but the baby died of malnutrition. Later in the year, she
returned to Japan and associated with the writers of Bungei sensen,4 which
eventually published her “Seryōshitsu nite” (In a Clinic Ward, 1927). As the
title suggests, this work is based on her experience during her journey in
Manchuria. The female protagonist and her husband are thrown into jail; but
because she is suffering from a severe case of beriberi triggered by her
pregnancy, she is sent to a medical clinic. The clinic, however, does not
offer the care she and the baby need. She has no money to buy milk.
Although she understands that breast-feeding would transmit her beriberi
and cause the baby’s death, she lets her baby suck on her breast. “No matter
whether it is a beriberi patient’s milk or pus, my beloved child is gulping it
down! . . . After all, we are mother and child only for a while. Ahead of me
awaits a jail, standing like a massive wall.” Hirabayashi continued to portray
similar, spirited women at the bottom of the social hierarchy, driven to rebel
out of sheer desperation. With these stories, Hirabayashi became an impor-
tant contributor to Bungei sensen.

4
Bungei sensen was supported by the Rōnōtō (Labor-Farmer Faction), which stood in
opposition to the Communist Party’s The NAPF, to which Sata contributed her works.

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In the 1920s, the anti-Communist Japanese government employed both the

“stick” of the Peace Preservation Law and the “carrot” of universal male
suffrage. The Soviet-dominated Comintern, in its 1932 “Thesis on Japan’s
Condition and the Japanese Communist Party’s Task” (commonly known in
Japan as “the ’32 Thesis”), saw fit to call for the destruction of Japan’s emperor
system. The imperiled Japanese Communist Party issued a counterargument,
based on their own sense of their country’s “condition.”5 This internecine
confusion precipitated a mass secession from the Party, known as tenkō
(renunciation). Within a month, 30 percent of imprisoned Communists had
renounced their party affiliation, and by 1935 the figure was close to 90 percent.
This tenkō phenomenon had a marked influence on literature. Typical man-
ifestations are to be found in Shimazaki Tōson’s Yoake-mae (Before the Dawn,
1929–35) and Hayashi Fusao’s (1903–75) Seinen (The Youth, 1932), especially in
the ways they describe the Meiji Restoration (1867–8).
Tōson’s Yoake-mae is a long historical novel that depicts the social changes
around the time of the Meiji Restoration from the viewpoint of a young
protagonist, the station chief of the Magome relay station on the Edo–Kyoto
Trunk Road. He is also a believer in Kokugaku (National Learning), a field of
study that tried to define Japan’s unique characteristics through the textual
explication of classical texts such as the Kojiki and the Man’yoshū. In the Edo
period, National Learning was widely popular among wealthy merchants and
landowners, rather than among the samurai class who valued Chinese studies
(privileging Confucianism). After the Meiji Restoration, devotees of National
Learning hoped to re-create the strong bonds of trust that they said had
united the emperor and the people before the warrior class began to mono-
polize political power. This movement was called ōsei fukko, the restoration
of imperial rule. Tōson wrote this novel based on his belief that the
Kokugaku ideal, deeply rooted among the people, was the real moving
force behind the Meiji Restoration.
The novel attracted both praise and criticism. Miyamoto Kenji (1908–2007),
one of the leaders of the Leninist Literature Movement along with Kurahara
Korehito, argued that Yoake-mae erred both ideologically and methodologi-
cally. He accused Tōson of failing to acknowledge that the Meiji Restoration

5
In 1933, two leading members of the Japanese Communist Party, Sano Manabu (1892–
1953) and Nabeyama Sadachika (1901–79), wrote a critique titled Kyōdō hikoku dōshi ni
tsuguru sho (A Statement to the Comrade Co-defendants), which criticized the Comintern
as a tool of Soviet foreign policy and proclaimed that the Japanese Communists should
develop their own strategy, one that conformed better to Japan’s history and actual
current conditions.

665
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had an element of bourgeois revolution, a lapse that undercut the’32 Thesis.

Miyamoto also criticized Tōson for not correctly appreciating the Restoration’s
“historical limitations” in that it had inaugurated another system of absolutist
control without first thoroughly dismantling the feudal system. Furthermore,
according to Miyamoto, Tōson was incapable of depicting the Meiji
Restoration from the perspective of the revolutionary proletariat.6
By contrast, Hayashi Fusao (1903–75), a NAPF writer, praised Yoake-mae.
Hayashi himself was beginning to serialize in the magazine Chūō kōron his
own historical novel about the Meiji Restoration, titled Seinen. The protago-
nists were Itō Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru, two actual leaders of the Meiji
government. Hayashi wrote this novel so as to re-invent those two as the
original revolutionists who tried to protect Japan from the colonizing powers
of the West. This deviation from the ’32 Thesis led some to conclude that
Hayashi had already defected, ideologically, when he started writing Seinen.
Around 1935, after the initial enpon sales strategy began to fail, literary
journalists started promoting a “literary renaissance” as the publishing indus-
try’s Next Big Thing. Although the number of reservations for enpon series
was still huge, many subscriptions were dropped, particularly after the Great
Depression of 1929. As a strategy to turn the mounting surplus of cheap
volumes into cash quickly, bargain-book dealers formed ad hoc associations,
such as the Teikoku Tosho Fukyūkai (Imperial Book Dissemination
Association) and Ryōsho Fukyūkai (Good Book Dissemination
Association). They held book fairs, selling all enpon copies uniformly for 10
sen each – one tenth of the original price. After a book fair held in Seoul,
Korea in 1932 succeeded in selling a large number, similar events were held in
Manchuria, Taiwan, and other locations under the Japanese occupation. This
greatly contributed to the dissemination of Japanese literature over the
occupied regions.
In his essay “Sōsaku hōhō-jō no shin-tenkan” (A New Change in the
Method of Writing, 1933), Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958) used a comment by
Engels to denounce Kurahara’s insistence on the unification of political
practice and creative activity. Prior to writing this essay, Tokunaga had
written Taiyō no nai machi (A Town with No Sunshine, 1929), the most
sophisticated proletarian novel, which fictionalized an actual printing com-
pany strike in which he himself had participated. Dramatic changes of scene
and a fast-moving narrative strongly suggest that Tokunaga wrote it with

6
Miyamoto Kenji, “Seiji to geijutsu: seiji no yūisei ni kansuru mondai,” in Puroretaria bunka
(October 1932–January 1933).

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cinematization in mind. “Sōsaku hōhō-jō no shin-tenkan” had the intended

liberating effect on writers who were feeling shackled by the political ten-
dentiousness of Kurahara’s theory.
Some writers explored new methods of expression, leaving questions of
Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy behind. Kokyū wasureubeki (Unforgettable Old
Friends, 1935) by Takami Jun (1907–65) features as narrator a writer wrestling
with psychological as well as political repression. Takami’s essay “Byōsha no
ushiro ni nete irarenai” (One Cannot Afford to Lie behind Description, 1936)
confessed that he was skeptical of consensus values, and no longer believed it
possible to share authentic emotion through objective description. The
narrator must participate in the action of the story. Takami’s arguments
were accepted as a literary manifesto by fellow-writers who were similarly
self-conscious about the act of writing.
One development during this period of “literary renaissance” in the mid to
late 1930s was the so-called unification of pure literature and popular litera-
ture. Yokomitsu Riichi, who had declared he would remain a writer of the
supremacy-of-art school, now advocated the unification of pure literature
and popular literature in his “Junsui shōsetsu-ron” (On the Pure Novel, 1935).
He identified the two essential elements of the popular novel as chance and
sentimentality. Interestingly, a work that exhibited a wealth of both of these
“essential” qualities appeared soon afterwards: Mugi to heitai (Wheat and
Soldiers, 1938), a novella by Hino Ashihei (1907–60), which gained huge
popularity nationwide. In 1937, the year the North China Incident (Marco
Polo Bridge Incident) occurred, Hino finished writing Funnyōtan (Some
Excrementitious Matter, 1937), and joined the Japanese Army. In February
of the following year, Funnyōtan won the sixth Akutagawa Award, and
attracted media attention as a bold work by a soldier on active duty. He
was then transferred to the Army’s Public Relations Department, and was
sent to China, where he witnessed the Battle of Xuzhou. This experience
became the basis for his novella Mugi to heitai. Hino’s novella, which was a
great hit, was a documentary of the battleground written by a soldier-writer
of the time. Following in Hino’s footsteps, another soldier on duty, Ueda
Hiroshi (1905–66), sent in his manuscript for Kōjin (Yellow Dust, 1938) from a
war zone, and Hibino Shirō (1903–75), who was wounded in a battle, wrote
Wūsun Kurı¯ku (Wusong Creek, 1939).
Soldiers at the front also formed a new market of readers. In December 1941,
the government took a step toward launching what it later called the Great
East Asia War. The government drafted people from a wide range of educa-
tional backgrounds, professions, and ages, and they joined the volunteer

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soldiers, who were primarily farmers and factory workers. This expansion of
military personnel entailed a diversification of reading materials among the
soldiers and officers. Realizing that Kingu magazine and kōdan stories were
insufficient reading, the military distributed a number of Japanese classics
including Man’yōshū as well as war stories. The largest demand among the
soldiers and officers was for gunkashū (collections of war songs), and the
military ordered several hundred thousand copies from distributors.
At the time of the North China Incident newspaper companies and
magazine publishers sent professional writers to the front as special corre-
spondents, resulting in book-length reportage. For example, Hayashi Fusao,
sent by Chūō Kōronsha, wrote “Shanhai sensen” (The Shanghai Front, 1937),
and Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–85), also sent by Chūō Kōronsha, wrote “Ikiteiru
heitai” (Living Soldiers, 1938). Ishikawa’s “Ikiteiru heitai” was barred from
circulation because it contained graphic descriptions of Japanese soldiers’
violence against noncombatants, and was considered to be a violation of the
Publication Law for “disturbing peace and order.” The Publication Law had
been revised to give harsher punishment, and as a result Ishikawa received a
four-month prison sentence, suspended for three years.
For the left-wing writers who were targeted by the Thought Criminal
Probation Law promulgated in 1936 and who were prohibited from writing, it
was an extremely difficult era. Government pressure was so strong that
Tokunaga Sunao had no choice but to discontinue the publication of his
Taiyō no nai machi. However, so long as a writer kept within the confines set
by the state, the sales of literary books were steady. If a writer chose the kinds
of topics the mass media liked, followed the preferences of the Ministry of
Home Affairs and high-ranking military officials, any work of fiction sold
almost as well as a bestseller. Having chosen this path, Iwata Toyo’o (1893–
1969), known as Shishi Bunroku after the war, wrote Kaigun (The Navy, 1942),
and Niwa Fumio (1904–2005) wrote Kaisen (A Naval Battle, 1942).
Paradoxically, the literary renaissance was possible despite, even because
of, wartime controls. It was only from 1944 that the number of publications
decreased and the paper quality noticeably deteriorated. Japanese supply
ships were sunk more frequently by the Allied Forces and the shortage of
supplies became severe. After Japan lost the war, the demand for books on
political philosophy and translations of foreign literature surged. Major
publishing companies that had taken refuge in Sapporo and in the western
cities started publishing large numbers of books on coarse recycled paper, and
the publishing industry quickly recovered.

668
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Canonization and popularization:
anthologies and literary prizes
edward mack

In 1926, the publishing company Kaizōsha launched a massive advertising

campaign for its new, multivolume Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Complete
Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature). The title proclaimed that the
anthology contained all of the works (or at least, all that mattered) of modern
“Japanese” literature, with the semantically ambiguous “Japanese” allowing
readers to conflate the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic senses of the word. The
accompanying copy made it clear that the “contemporary” period coincided
with the creation of the modern state in 1868. The anthology made material a
national literary canon even as the state was in the midst of an imperial project
that involved the strategic manipulation of the boundaries of “Japanese”-ness.
The anthology found a receptive market and initiated a boom in cheaply
priced anthologies known as the one-yen book boom (enpon būmu). These
anthologies were sold not only throughout the “inner territories,” but also to
Japanese-reading communities throughout the empire and the world. Later,
when remaindered copies of the mass-produced Complete Works reentered
the market at even lower prices, they reached still more readers. The result,
therefore, was not merely the transfer of cultural prestige to certain literary
works but also their broad dissemination. Many readers discovered literature
through these durable books decades (and sometimes generations) after they
were originally purchased.
In 1935, roughly a decade later, the publishing company Bungei Shunjūsha
launched a new literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. As with the anthology,
this prize was not the first of its kind; it was, however, far more successful
than its predecessors. This was due to the centrality and power of its backer,
Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), who published the general interest magazine Bungei
shunjū (1923–); the coverage the award subsequently received in that maga-
zine, and in the press in general; the respect accorded to its namesake, the
author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927); the authority of its selection
committee members, including Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Yokomitsu

669
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Riichi (1898–1947), and Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972); and the attention

drawn by related scandals, including a public argument between Kawabata
and Dazai Osamu (1909–48) and the uproar over Ishihara Shintarō’s (b. 1932)
selection for 1955. Awarded biannually to this day, the Akutagawa Prize
continues to draw national press coverage and to dramatically increase
sales of the winning works.
The Complete Works and the Akutagawa Prize represent moments in which
cultural legitimacy and prestige were transferred to specific works through
extra-literary mechanisms. That is to say not that the choices were arbitrary,
but that the necessarily subjective decisions of the judges were then mediated
through material mechanisms. These mechanisms did more than celebrate
and legitimate works. They also celebrated and reinforced the generic notion
of “modern Japanese literature,” a category whose contents could change
without itself being called into question. By utilizing the dominant frame-
work of the nation, this rubric situated this literature within a constellation of
national literatures, assuring everyone that Japan possessed this marker of
advanced-nation status. It presented the works to readers who identified
Japanese as something belonging to them, in contrast to other national
literatures, which did not.
These mechanisms were also effective marketing tools, rendering the
selected works as far more valuable commodities. The Complete Works
garnered roughly 340,000 subscribers at its peak, despite containing works
that previously sold only a fraction of that number of copies. The whole, the
canon of modern Japanese literature, was more valuable than the sum of its
parts. As for the Akutagawa Prize, it is well known that it too can greatly
increase sales of a work.
One literary prize that is not awarded in Japan, but which also conflates
individual writers with the nation, must also be mentioned: the Nobel Prize
for Literature. At the time of this publication, only two Japanese writers have
received the award: Kawabata Yasunari in 1968 and Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) in
1994; there is also speculation over the odds that a third writer, Murakami
Haruki (b. 1949), might receive the prize in the near future. In the preceding
two cases, the prize has been attended by revelry over national achievement,
reinforcing the link between literary production and the ethno-nation-state.
While the success of ethnically Korean writers such as Yu Miri (b. 1968) and Ri
Kaisei (b. 1935) and foreign-born writers like Yang Yi (b. 1964), all of whom
received the Akutagawa Prize, should have destabilized such a link, they have
often instead been treated as deviations from a normative ethnonational
literary identity.

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National literary anthologies like the Complete Works experienced a resur-

gence in the decades following World War II, beginning with the publication
of Kadokawa Shoten’s Complete Works of Shōwa Literature from 1952. This
inaugurated a new, three-decade-long boom in large-scale anthology pub-
lication. Although such anthologies continue to appear, many argue that the
loss of cultural centrality for literary production will mean that this mechan-
ism has lost its efficacy. It could also be argued that changes in the world of
publishing and the migration of much of the earlier works to the Internet
have undermined the form, though not the rubric. Regardless of its future
efficacy, however, the historical influence of the national literary model
exerted by these forms on readers, writers, and scholars is clear.

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Colonialism, translation, literature:
Takahama Kyoshi’s passage to Korea
serk-bae suh

In 1911, less than a year after Japan’s annexation of Korea, the prominent
haiku poet and writer Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) serialized an account of
his travels to Korea in Osaka mainichi shinbun (Osaka Daily Newspaper) and
Tokyo nichinichi shinbun (Tokyo Daily). The story is a fictionalization of the
author’s own experience of traveling to Korea twice in the same year. The
newspapers, which probably funded the trips, commissioned him to write
about Japan’s newly acquired colony. The novel, which follows the narrator
from Shimonoseki, in Japan, to the Korean cities of Pusan, Taegu, and Seoul,
and then finally to Pyŏngyang, revolves around the narrator’s encounters
with Koreans from all walks of life as well as various types of Japanese settlers
and sojourners in the colony, ranging from small business owners struggling
to scrape by to tairiku rōnin (continental adventurers) pressing for Japanese
expansion further into the Asian Continent. In 1912, a slightly revised version
of the story, entitled Chōsen (Korea), was published in book form.
Not only is the novel one of the earliest literary renditions of Japanese
colonial experience in Korea, it also provides a valuable window into the
issues of collective identity, language, and translation that would continue
to reverberate in later Japanese-language literary works about colonial
Korea, including “Futei senjin” (Recalcitrant Korean, 1922) by Nakanishi
Inosuke (1887–1958), “Junsa no iru fūkei: 1923 nen no hitotsu no sukecchi”
(Landscape with a Patrolman: A Sketch from 1923, 1929) by Nakajima
Atsushi (1909–42), and “Kusa fukashi” (Deep Grass, 1940) by Kim Saryang
(1914–50), to name a few.
When the narrator and his wife arrive at the port of Pusan, they witness a
Japanese merchant who underpays his young Korean porter and then shoos
away the protesting boy. The narrator feels ashamed as “a compatriot,” as if
he himself were the one behaving shamefully. In other words, the narrator’s
embrace of collective Japanese identity coincides with a feeling of shame that
might open up the possibility to reflect on how he is implicated in the colonial

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relationship. What pushes the narrator toward Japanese national conscious-

ness is his encounter with Korea, Japan’s colony. He confesses that before
coming to Korea he never had a chance to ponder “what is called our nation”
(waga kokumin to iu mono) and what it means to be “a people” (minzoku),
separate from the rest of humanity. However, after setting foot in Korea, he
cannot help but think of himself as Japanese.
His developing national consciousness leads him to harbor what he calls
“contradictory feelings.” He feels sympathetic toward Koreans as a colonized
people, yet at the same time he cannot help but feel proud to be a member of
the Japanese nation. The tension arising from the narrator’s split conscience
seems to be resolved by his ultimate affirmation of Japan as a great nation.
Nevertheless, this tension lingers in the novel. For example, despite his
identification with Japan, the narrator sympathizes with his Korean translator
Hong Wŏnsŏn and with the kisaeng (Korean courtesans comparable to the
Japanese geisha) Sodam when he locates a sliver of contempt for the Japanese
in their smiles.
Even though the narrator embraces Japanese identity in the face of
Koreans, the novel betrays the uncertainty of ethnic boundaries between
the Japanese and Koreans. It captures the anxiety that the Japanese might feel
about the lack of clear ethnic boundaries, for example when the narrator’s
friend Hoshino, who invited him to visit Korea, frowns upon seeing Japanese
children playing with their Korean friends in the street and talking to each
other in “half-Japanese and half-Korean.” Hoshino does not merely resent the
creolization of Japanese or the notion of Japanese settlers “going native.”
Rather, he reveals his anxiety over the porosity of ethnic boundaries between
the Japanese and Koreans, by lamenting “if this goes on, the Japanese will
have become Korean (nihonjin no hō ga chōsenka shite shimaunoda).”
With the lack of phenotypical differences like skin color, language con-
stituted the most conspicuous ethnic marker in colonial Korea. Language
strictly differentiated the colonizer from the colonized, and Japanese was
privileged as the colonizer’s language. In the novel, Japanese thus registers as
the language of progress and eclipses Korean, so much so that Hong tells the
narrator that he has urged hot-headed nationalist youths in his home pro-
vince Pyŏngan to learn the language instead of resisting colonial rule.
According to his reasoning, learning Japanese is equivalent to embracing
colonial rule.
Paradoxically, it is also through language that the colonized can cross
ethnic boundaries, although the intricate mechanisms of colonial bureau-
cracy, including the household registration system, rendered illegitimate

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such transgressions. Ethnic crossing does not necessarily involve a conscious

act of deception on the part of the colonized who desires to “pass” as the
colonizer. Due to the absence of phenotypical differences, Koreans who
speak fluent Japanese are often assumed to be Japanese.
It comes as a surprise to the narrator that a group of geisha speaking the
Hiroshima and Osaka dialects at his welcome party turn out to be Koreans
originally from Seoul, because he has assumed that speaking regional dialects
must indicate Japanese identity. Needless to say, in the narrator’s mind,
language stands out as the surest marker of the homogeneous collectivity
of the Japanese nation as opposed to Korean identity, despite the hetero-
geneity of the Japanese language.
At one point in the novel, Japan’s place in the colonial world order is also
linguistically mapped in relation to the West. While observing a Japanese
Protestant minister teaching Japanese to a group of Koreans, many of whom
look clueless about what the minister is explaining, the narrator recollects
that he learned English in the same manner from an American missionary in
middle school. He thus projects himself onto the colonized, who are in a
linguistically and politically unequal relationship with the colonizer, and his
encounter with Korea enables him to retrospectively see Japan’s own
unequal relationship with the West. Perhaps, the narrator’s consciousness
of Western domination lies behind his “contradictory feelings,” making him
simultaneously sympathize with Koreans, the actually colonized, and proud
of Japan’s rise as the only non-Western colonial power.
The contradiction is especially significant because it parallels Japanese
nationalist discourse on colonialism. For example, a similar sentiment creeps
into one of Yasuda Yojūrō’s (1910–81) essays on his 1932 trip to Korea
(published in Kogito [Cogito], no. 35, 1935), before his rise to fame as the
foremost aesthetician of the Japanese Romantic school (Nihon rōmanha).
Though it fleetingly laments the fate of the Korean nation, the travelogue
nevertheless implicitly affirms Japan’s colonization of Korea as an inevitable
event in the course of Japan’s struggle to survive by imitating the West. The
writer and critic Hayashi Fusao’s (1903–75) infamous Daitōa sensō kōteiron (An
Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War, 1964–5) is another notable example
that shows how this contradiction pervades the insidiously apologetic justi-
fication for Japanese colonialism. In the book, Hayashi simultaneously
acknowledges the cruelty of Japanese colonial rule over Korea and legiti-
mizes Japan’s colonization of the country as an unavoidable part of Japan’s
long struggle to defend the nation against Western aggression since its forced
opening to the West.

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In the novel Chōsen, the narrator’s contradictory feelings never fully

develop into critical reflections on Japanese colonialism. Nevertheless, he
verges on self-reflection at least momentarily when he interacts with his
translator Hong. As a matter of fact, the novel illuminates both translation’s
challenge to and its collusion with colonialism through the character of
Hong.
When the narrator first meets Hong, what strikes him most is Hong’s
harrowingly wrinkled mouth, which seems more like a painful scar than a
normal sign of aging. Ishibashi Kōzō, Hong’s associate and a friend of the
narrator’s, informs him that Hong lost all of his teeth due to torture and
wears dentures. (It is later revealed that Hong was once an anti-Japanese
patriot, protesting Japan’s annexation of Korea.) Thus, Hong’s wrinkled
mouth metonymically stands for a trace of colonial violence, which has
transformed an anti-Japanese patriot into an associate of the Japanese colo-
nialist Ishibashi.
In a sense, Hong prefigures a vast number of translators serving for
Japanese colonialism. Japanese colonial rule in Korea, like other instances
of colonial rule, required an army of translators in order to ensure that its
power pervaded every nook and cranny of society. Despite its highly intru-
sive apparatus of governance, Japanese colonial rule could not have operated
without translation simply because the majority of the colonized could not
understand the colonizer’s orders, rules, and laws in his language.
As a supposed representative of Korea, Hong fleshes out the violent
implications of translation. When Hong accompanies the narrator and
Ishibashi to social gatherings and various places, he translates Korean
thoughts, customs, and history for the Japanese. Through his translation,
“Korea” is reified as the sum of the particular attributes assigned to it and its
people, and represented “as it is.” As a Korean, Hong is supposed to authen-
tically represent Korea. Thus when claiming that Japan’s colonization has
saved Korea from the tyranny of its corrupt and incompetent ruling class, he
speaks on behalf of the entire nation, the majority of whom cannot speak for
themselves in the colonizer’s language.
Although the narrator respects Hong for his poise and excellent command
of Japanese, at times he feels uncertain about whether Hong faithfully
translates for him. Finding himself at the mercy of the translator, the narrator
is acutely aware of his limitations in communicating with the colonized.
Despite the risk of miscommunication, he has to rely on translation in order
to communicate with the majority of Koreans. Interestingly, the novel has a
couple of moments during which the narrator obsessively focuses on Hong’s

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disfigured mouth while observing him translating for the Japanese. On those
occasions, the novel seems to suggest that, ultimately, it is the acute aware-
ness of violence rather than any essentialist idea of ethnic or linguistic
differences that turns an instance of translation into a venue in which the
colonizer can encounter the colonized as the other who persistently ques-
tions the legitimacy of his understanding of the colonized.

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Primitivism and imperial literature of
Taiwan and the South Seas
robert tierney

The South Seas (Nan’yō) – roughly what we now consider Southeast Asia
including Taiwan – was not only an important vector of Japan’s imperial
expansion from the late nineteenth century, but also a focus for the colonial
imagination of many writers. In the 1880s, intellectuals such as Shiga
Shigetaka and Taguchi Ukichi strongly advocated Japan’s southern expansion
(nanshinron), whether through trade or conquest. In 1895 Japan acquired
Taiwan, its first southern colony, and in 1914 it seized Micronesia from
Germany and later ruled the islands under a League of Nations mandate.
Thanks to war-induced disruptions in European trade with Asia, Japan vastly
expanded its trade ties and investments in Southeast Asia from 1914, sparking
a boom in travel writing and domestic expositions featuring Nan’yō. One can
date from this time the development of a “popular (taishū) orientalism”1 in
Japanese mass media, epitomized by the manga Bōken Dankichi (The
Adventures of Dankichi, 1933–9), in which a young Japanese boy rules over
a tropical island peopled by cannibals. This popular series and other similar
works open a window onto Japanese stereotypes about Nan’yō and its
“savage” inhabitants.
To be sure, these stereotypes did not appear ex nihilo in the 1930s. In 1884,
Suzuki Keikun, another proponent of southern expansion, published Nanyō
tanken jikki (A True Record of my Explorations of the South Seas) in which he
describes acts of cannibalism in the Marshall Islands, although later scholars
have noted his extensive reliance on Western sources.2 By contrast with the
Marshall islanders, the Taiwanese aborigines were generally depicted as
headhunters, notably in monochrome prints (kawaraban) published at the

1
Kawamura Minato “Taishū orientarizumu to Ajia ninshiki,” in Bunka no naka no shoku-
minchi, vol. 7 of Iwanami kōza kindai Nihon to shokuminchi, ed. Oe Shinobu et al. (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 107–36.
2
Takayama Jun, Nankai no daitankenka Suzuki Keikun, sono kyozō to jitsuzō (Tokyo: San’ichi
shobō, 1995).

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time of the 1873 Taiwan military expedition. After Taiwan became a Japanese
colony in 1895, Nitobe Inazō, then a bureaucrat with the Government-
General of Taiwan, justified colonization as a civilizing mission that would
eradicate headhunting. Notwithstanding vaunted claims to bring civilization
to “savages,” the colonial regime only extended its control to the resource-
rich interior of Taiwan by waging brutal military campaigns, culminating in
the genocidal five-year pacification campaign of 1909–14.
Even after law and order were established in the aboriginal territories,
aboriginal rebellions periodically occurred, most famously the 1930 Musha
Incident, in which Ataiyal tribesmen massacred 134 Japanese at a school
sporting event. Particularly after the Musha Incident, the “savages,” hence-
forth “pacified,” often appear in fictional works by Japanese writers. In these
works, the “savages” are often innocent and pure creatures and their villages
are depicted as utopian spaces free from conflict and the discontents of
civilization. In addition, after the “savages” have been incorporated in the
Japanese empire, writers often avail themselves of the trope of savagery to
search for a deeper self or an inner savage that lay hidden beneath the veneer
of their modern identity. In Ōshika Taku’s 1935 novella Yabanjin (The
Savage), for example, a young man disillusioned with modern life is sent to
police the highlands of Taiwan and sets out to find his primeval self.
Exchanging his police uniform for aboriginal clothes, he joins a headhunting
expedition and eventually marries an aboriginal woman to free himself from
the civilized modernity that prevailed in metropolitan Japan.
In short, Japan’s colonial literature of Taiwan and Nan’yō offers diame-
trically opposed images of indigenous peoples perhaps best summed up by
the contrast of the violent headhunter and the happy primitive. Scholars of
Western colonial culture have noted a similar ambivalence in the trope of the
“savage” in Western discourse. One in a series of colonial powers to rule
Taiwan and Micronesia, Japan borrowed liberally from its imperial predeces-
sors even as it strove to distinguish its rule from theirs. In particular, Japanese
imperialists were quick to adopt the entire panoply of colonial discourses that
had accumulated during five centuries of Western exploration and coloniza-
tion of non-Western parts of the world. As I will show by considering the
cases of Satō Haruo and Nakajima Atsushi, Japanese writers were also
strongly stimulated by the speculations of anthropologists and by translations
of Western writers such as Pierre Loti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph
Conrad, and Herman Melville.
Anthropology, which entered Japan during the late nineteenth century,
was a science of “savagery” that exerted a great influence on writers. Though

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 Primitivism and imperial literature of Taiwan and the South Seas

the earliest Japanese anthropologists concerned themselves with speculations

on the origins of the Japanese people, they later turned their attention to the
inhabitants of the Japanese colonies. Torii Ryūzō, the most important aca-
demic anthropologist in the first half of the twentieth century, led four study
missions to the interior of Taiwan between 1896 and 1899. In later years, he
spoke with wonderment of the discovery of Japan’s very own “savages” in
Taiwan, who “would offer a wonderful field of studies” to Japanese
anthropologists.3 If Torii strove to classify the different tribes of Taiwan,
Mori Ushinosuke lived in Taiwan for two decades and advised the colonial
government on policies toward aboriginal societies. Critical of colonial
policies that aimed to assimilate the aborigines, he served as the first curator
of the aboriginal holdings of the Taiwan Museum and sought to preserve
artifacts threatened by colonial policies. Similar to Mori in Taiwan, Hijikata
Hisakatsu was a sculptor who went to Palau in 1929 to draw inspiration from
primitive art. During his thirteen years’ residence there, he acquired an
unmatched ethnographic expertise on Micronesian societies and published
ethnographic diaries, studying Micronesian customs, religions, and arts. Mori
and Hijikata also exerted strong influence on writers who traveled to the
colonies.
In the summer of 1920, Satō Haruo (1892–1964) went to Taiwan and,
through the good offices of Mori Ushinosuke, he traveled through the
unsettled aboriginal regions under police escort. After returning to Japan,
Satō wrote a dozen literary works based on his Taiwan experiences, including
the travel journal Musha and a short story “Demon Bird” (Machō), both set in
aboriginal Taiwan. Published in the Chūō kōron in October 1923, the latter is
an allegorical work that analyzes an episode of scapegoating in an aboriginal
village. Satō ostensibly obtained the idea for the story from a brief passage in
Mori’s Ethnography of Taiwan in which he notes that members of certain
Ataiyal group believe that a mysterious bird (hafune) appears to people about
to die and that certain people can manipulate this bird; the bird manipulator
sometimes becomes a scapegoat targeted by other members of the group
after the occurrence of unexplained death. Adopting the objective style and
the cool distance of an ethnographer examining a primitive society, the
narrator of “Demon Bird” first offers an explanation for the custom of
scapegoating and then an account of the most recent incident of persecution.
In his explanation, the narrator says aborigines tend to discover a bird

3
Torii Ryūzō, “Torii jinruigaku kenkyū: Taiwan no genjūmin joron,” in Torii Ryūzō
zenshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1976), 4.

679
 robert tierney

manipulator in a person who is different from others in her behavior and

therefore inspires anxiety in the community. As villagers begin to spread
rumors, the suspect is targeted as a scapegoat, but the villagers refrain from
attacking her until an external catastrophe strikes the village.
The narrator places the persecution within the aboriginal village in the
context of a colonial conquest. The villagers only set upon the hapless bird
manipulator after a colonial army has marched through their village and
ordered all young men to assemble inside a building that they then proceed to
burn down. Indeed, the persecutors of the alleged bird manipulator copy the
tactics the colonial army had employed against them, offering an instance in
which the colonized imitate the barbarism rather than the civilization of the
colonizer. The narrator also highlights the ethnographer’s dependence on a
colonial apparatus when he describes how he happened to learn of this
episode: “Two armed police officers protected me on my right and left . . .
Two completely assimilated savages served as our guides and porters . . . The
tale I am going to tell was told in turns by these two porters as they were
walking and then translated for me by one of the policemen in our party.”
In addition to being a subtle deconstruction of an ethnographic report,
“Demon Bird” is also an allegory on the recent scapegoating of Koreans
during the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923. The work was
published shortly after the earthquake and in later years Satō Haruo spoke of
“Demon Bird” as a novel about rumors (ryūgen), a key term associated with
the 1923 quake. While he never refers by name to this massacre, the persecu-
tion of Koreans corresponds to a similar schema: a natural disaster of
unprecedented scale, the role of rumors, the fabrication/recognition of an
invisible enemy, and the reaffirmation of the boundaries of the community
by massacre of a designated scapegoat. In this story, Satō shows the terrible
price exacted by imperialism on the streets of Tokyo itself.
Just as Satō uses allegory to criticize Japan’s imperialism in the 1920s,
Nakajima Atsushi (1909–42) writes allegories of the South Seas in the early
1940s. Best known for his stories based on Chinese classics, Nakajima is in
many ways the exemplary writer of the Japanese empire. After growing up in
Korea, Nakajima worked as an English teacher in Yokohama until 1941, when
he accepted a position of Japanese language textbook editor with the
Nan’yōchō or South Sea Agency that administered Micronesia. The previous
year, he completed Hikari, kaze to yume (Light, Wind, and Dreams), a fictional
autobiography of Robert Louis Stevenson’s final years in Samoa, and critics
have interpreted his departure for Micronesia as a self-conscious emulation of
Stevenson. Nakajima became a close friend of the ethnographer Hijikata

680
 Primitivism and imperial literature of Taiwan and the South Seas

Hisakatsu and drew liberally on the latter’s diaries and ethnographic notes in
writing his fiction or travel sketches.
Nakajima’s short story “Mariyan” is a portrait of a highly educated and
assimilated Micronesian woman as seen through the eyes of a young Japanese
colonial official and an ethnographer named H (a reference to Hijikata). The
narrator first meets Mariyan at H’s house, where she assists the ethnographer
in translating a Palauan oral narrative. On a later visit to Mariyan’s home, he
discovers Japanese books, including an anthology of English poetry edited by
Kuriyagawa Hakuson and a translation of Pierre Loti’s novel Marriage of Loti,
a prototype for colonial romances in the South Seas. He feels strangely pained
(itamashii) to discover that Mariyan reads these works, indicating a degree of
empathy and identification with her. Later, he records Mariyan’s critique of
Loti’s novel: “Naturally, I don’t know anything about what went on long ago
and in Polynesia, but even so, it is hard to believe that such things could really
have happened.” In effect, the narrator, though he serves as a colonial official
in Palau, attempts to situate himself toward Mariyan outside the ordinary
binary of colonizer and colonized, in part by stressing his affinities with her
and in part by his implicit critique of Western imperialism.
Nakajima was fully aware that his own views of the Nan’yō had been
shaped by his encounter with Western writers. In the story “Mahiru” (High
Noon, 1942), the narrator takes himself to task for the inauthenticity of his
views of Micronesia. He accuses himself of seeing not the actual scenery but
rather a stereotypical South Seas haunted by the “ghost of modernity and of
Europe” and refracted through the vision of Western artists. While he
imagines he is gazing at the Nan’yō, he sees only “reproductions of
Gauguin paintings” or “pale copies of the Polynesia depicted by Loti and
Melville.” The narrator points to one of the blind spots in Japan’s vision of its
colonies: Japan’s empire building presupposed a prior self-colonization and a
larger project to catch up with the West. In 1995, Masaki Tsuneo argued that
prewar Japanese had to put on “western eyeglasses” to view the other nations
of Asia before they could actually rule colonies in Asia.4 Anticipating Masaki’s
postcolonial speculations by more than five decades, Nakajima offers the first
diagnosis and extended reflection on the aporia and ambivalence of the
Japanese colonial gaze toward the South.

4
Masaki Tsuneo, Shokuminchi gensō (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1995), 239–47.

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 71
From empire to nation: the spatial
imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s
seiji m. lippit

Modernity in Japan, as elsewhere, was characterized by massive displace-

ments of bodies, technologies, and discourses across extended territories, a
movement that left its unmistakable imprint on literary and cultural practice.
In particular, the formation of the modern nation-state, the establishment of
industrial capitalism, and the creation and expansion of empire represented
an uprooting and reconfiguration of prior social and cultural formations that
decisively shaped the spatial imaginary of modern literature. This chapter
focuses on a particular trajectory within this historical process, namely the
line extending from modernism’s engagement with the topography of
empire in the 1920s and early 1930s to the wrenching dislocations that
accompanied the implosion of empire and the perpetually deferred “return”
to the nation in the immediate postwar period.
Literary critic Maeda Ai has shown how the construction of modern
interiority, typically understood as a withdrawal from the broader landscape
of social and political conflict, was closely linked to the widespread migration
to the cities in the late nineteenth century that undergirded the emergence of
modernity in Japan. Maeda argues that the topos of the second-floor boarding
room, the literary space that framed the construction of interiority in such
landmark works as Futabatei Shimei’s (1864–1909) Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds,
1887–9) – often considered the first modern novel – to Tayama Katai‘s (1872–
1930) Futon (The Quilt, 1907) – considered the origin of the I-novel – was the
minimum unit of urban space transformed by migration from the country-
side. Even earlier, Mori Ōgai‘s (1862–1922) “Maihime” (1890) had figured the
discovery of interiority in terms of a corporeal and affective movement from
Tokyo to Berlin (at the height of its imperial power) to colonial Saigon.
By the 1920s, the accelerated process of urbanization, which involved the
rapid swelling of populations in the cities, the rise of consumer capitalism, the
explosion of mass culture, and the increasing politicization of cultural pro-
duction, had placed this interiority under siege. Both modernist and

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 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

proletarian literary practice can be seen as responding, in different ways, to

these transformations, recording the dispersal and transformation of subjec-
tivities within this fluid environment while tracking the multiple sensations
and affects produced by the commodification of the human body and its
dislocation from familiar sites of social and cultural meaning. Meanwhile, the
emergence of the discourse of the I-novel during this time (retroactively
applied to prior literary production) can be seen as a reaction formation to the
destabilization of literary interiority.
Alongside such processes of modernization and urbanization, the forma-
tion and expansion of empire – a development roughly contemporaneous
with the creation of the modern nation-state – was a driving force in the
creation and dispersal of subjectivities across vast spaces. As a material
practice, literature was deeply involved in the formation of both national
and imperial space through its participation in the creation and dissemination
of a common, standardized language. The emergence of the conception of a
national language, which gathered steam in the period following the Sino-
Japanese War, was closely connected to the perceived need to spread the
Japanese language across the actual and projected space of the Japanese
empire.
Yet such a spread of language, no less than of bodies, ideologies, or social
practices, was not a smooth or continuous process, but was instead met with
repeated interruptions and resistances. In the fiction of the 1920s, the topo-
graphy of empire comes to frame fundamental contradictions in Japanese
modernity, conflicts that coalesce around Japan’s identity as a non-Western
imperial power and the unresolved displacements and contradictions
between nation and empire as the basis for modern subjective identification.
Modernist experiments with the national language should be understood
within this context.
Proletarian literature engaged the space of empire as a site of class struggle
and anticolonial conflict. For example, Hirabayashi Taiko’s “Seryōshitsu
nite” (In a Clinic Ward, 1927) is set in a charity hospital in the colonial
territory of Manchuria, which is marked as a foreign material and linguistic
space. This territory, however, also exists as a part of the power structure of
the Japanese state, which comprises a complex network including institutions
of medical science, discipline, and the commodification of human bodies.
The heroine of the work moves from one space of incarceration to another –
from the hospital ward, dominated by the instrumental power of medical
research and capital accumulation, to the space of the prison, dominated by
the apparatus of state power. Spatially, there exists no line of escape; rather,

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the only possible way out is temporal, in the promise of a future revolution
hinted at by the flashing, bright red light that adorns the entrance to the
prison in the work’s closing line.
Modernist writers who engaged with colonial and semi-colonial topogra-
phies in their fiction and travel writings include Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
(1892–1927), Satō Haruo (1892–1964), Nakajima Atsushi (1909–42), Hayashi
Fumiko (1903–51), and Yoshiyuki Eisuke (1906–40). Avant-garde poets Anzai
Fuyue (1898–1965) and Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–90) founded the pioneering
journal A in the city of Dalian in colonial Manchuria. Akutagawa’s kaika-
mono (enlightenment pieces), including one of his most famous stories,
“Butōkai” (The Ball, 1920), along with Edogawa Rampo’s “Oshie to tabisuru
otoko” (Traveler with the Pasted Cloth Picture, 1929), cast a nostalgic glance
at Meiji era Tokyo as a colonial landscape, thus creating a palimpsest of
Tokyo as simultaneously a colonial city and an imperial capital. Yet, it is
perhaps the writings of Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) that most prominently
underscore the stakes of the modernist engagement with topographies of
empire.
The relation of modernist literature to the urban landscape is often
discussed in the context of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, whose
material and symbolic impact permeated cultural practice. It should be
pointed out, however, that the earthquake cannot be reduced to a natural
disaster alone, for its historical significance is closely tied to the context of
Japan’s imperial project. Thus the post-earthquake violence toward Koreans
and other residents deemed foreign or subversive at the hands of vigilante
groups and police can be seen to reflect a consciousness of the violence of
colonial policy as of the growing resistance to it – symbolized, for example,
by the March 1, 1919 uprising against colonial rule in Korea. Furthermore, the
reconstruction of Tokyo, led by Home Minister Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), the
former administrator of colonial Taiwan and the first director of the South
Manchurian Railway, took place under the rubric of rebuilding the “imperial
capital,” and was intended to showcase the city as a metropolitan center to
rival those of Europe.
The ruin and rebuilding of Tokyo serve as the context for much of
modernist practice across a variety of genres, including literature, poetry,
film, photography, and architecture. Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83), writing not
long after completion of the imperial capital’s reconstruction was pro-
claimed, wrote of a literature that had lost its home, as embodied in a city
whose continual cycles of transformation had left it bereft of material
repositories of memory. The modernist response to this sense of loss

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 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

developed along two trajectories, an enjoyment of dynamic change and the

liberation from traditional social forms on the one hand, and a sense of
nostalgia for what was being lost on the other.
For Yokomitsu, this ambivalence found expression in colonial and semi-
colonial topographies. In “Aoi Tai-i” (Pale Captain, 1927), the narrator crosses
over to colonial Seoul, where, under the pale, electrified light of the colonial
state apparatus, Korean and Chinese addicts and beggars occupy the margins
of the space of representation. Such depictions of squalor and degeneration
typically serve, in colonial narratives, to highlight the civilized positionality of
the colonizer. In Yokomitsu’s story, however, this opposition collapses in the
final scene, in which the narrator seeks out the imprint of the dead addict’s
face in the muddy ground: “Within that death mask I discovered my own
contorted face . . . I began to feel all round my own face with my hands. No
matter how much I felt my own face, it was the face of the shaking beggar
that was there, living, before my eyes, countless trembling faces, weaving
before me, clinging and sucking like tentacles.” The death mask here serves
as a mirror, both reflecting and proliferating the narrator’s subjectivity.
Such conflicts of identity further unfold in the variegated, fluid topography
of the semi-colonial city in Yokomitsu’s novel Shanhai (Shanghai, 1928–32). As
the novel’s title indicates, there is a certain conjunction of text and city – both
are conceived as assemblages of material objects (written words and bodies)
that circulate through networks defined by the relations of ideology, capital,
and political/military power. As Maeda Ai has written, Yokomitsu depicts the
city as being composed of three separate yet intersecting spaces – the colonial
city, the revolutionary city, and the slum city. Each is defined according to
different relations to capital and to institutions of political and military power.
They also represent shifting alliances and identifications – between Japan and
the Western imperial powers on the one hand, and between Japan and China
as belonging to a common cultural/ethnic sphere on the other. By the end of
the narrative, Sanki and Osugi, the novel’s two protagonists, have traversed
this entire terrain and arrive at the pitch blackness of Osugi’s squalid room
amidst the general strike that has shut down the city.
The 1930s saw increasing interest in the gaichi, or the outer territories of the
Japanese imperial state, as reflected in Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s (1905–85) Sōbō (The
Multitude, 1935), which narrated the story of Japanese settlers migrating to
Brazil and won the inaugural Akutagawa Prize in 1935. Writings by Korean
writers in Japanese also appeared in major literary journals with increasing
frequency, including Kim Saryang’s (1914–50) “Hikari no naka ni” (Into the
Light, 1939), which was nominated for an Akutagawa Prize in 1940. The first

685
 seiji m. lippit

Daitōa Bungakusha Taikai (Greater East Asia Writers’ Conference), in which

Yokomitsu Riichi played a prominent role, brought delegations of writers
from around the Japanese empire to Tokyo in 1942.
As the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 marked a new
stage in Japan’s military push into the Asian continent and the mobilization
for total war, depictions of the peripheral spaces of the Japanese empire were
increasingly tied to the war effort. Some of the most prominent writers of the
day, including Yokomitsu and Hayashi Fumiko, were sent overseas by news-
papers, journals, and the government in order to write accounts of the war
for the reading public. Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s “Ikiteiru heitai” (Living Soldiers,
1938) led to the banning of the journal in which it appeared and the arrest of
the author. The works of Hino Ashihei (1907–60) chronicling the lives of
ordinary soldiers on battlefields in China became massive bestsellers, leading
to the author’s purge after the war. Not all literary depictions of the gaichi can
be reduced to mere military propaganda, however, as shown in the case of
Ibuse Masuji’s (1898–1993) Hana no machi (City of Flowers, 1942), which
explored the multiethnic and multilinguistic space of occupied Singapore.
The implosion of the empire at the end of the war marked a radical
transformation in the spatial imaginary of Japanese literature. Historians
such as Mitani Taichirō have argued that the loss of empire, sudden and
automatic as it was, did not engender any extended process of decoloniza-
tion, an engagement with the material and psychological consequences of the
collapse of the imperial state.1 However, the implosion of empire left its
unmistakable traces on the literature of the immediate postwar period.
In his essay “Metsubō ni tsuite” (On Ruin, 1948), for example, Takeda
Taijun (1912–76) described the fundamental rupture that attended the collapse
of empire. Takeda recalls that he learned of the nation’s defeat amidst the
sounds of jubilant celebration on the city streets of Shanghai, where he spent
the end of the war. He notes that he experienced then for the first time a sense
of “absolute ruin” (zenteki metsubō), unprecedented in Japanese history. While
Japanese cultural history is filled with stories of the fall of individual heroes or
the ruination of families and lineages, the total collapse of the nation was a
new experience: “Seen from the world’s perspective, Japan’ s partial ruin, and
therefore the surviving residue, may appear as some grotesque, sinewy
foodstuff that remains undigested. However, just this amount of collapse

1
See Mitani Taichirō, “Dai hakkan maegaki,” in Iwanami Kōza: Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi,
vol. 8, Ajia no reisen to datsu-shokuminchika (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), vii–viii.

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 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

has, in the history of the Japanese sensibility regarding ruin, given to it a

completely new countenance, one of absolute ruin.”
For Takeda, ruin is something on the order of a bodily affect as much as
any political or religious concept. It follows the “physical” (butsuriteki) and
“spatial” (kūkan) laws of the universe, whereby nations and races are chewed
up and digested like so many plants and animals. Ruin is, in essence, a visceral
sensation produced by defeat in war and the collapse of empire, a sensation of
being thrust outside the boundaries of national identity into an existence
characterized by an abject corporeality. This is, for example, the fundamental
theme of Takeda’s classic fictional work Mamushi no sue (This Outcast
Generation, 1947), which revolves around the experience of dejection and
degradation haunting Japanese residents of Shanghai in the days following
the defeat. Narrating a woman’s attempt to exact revenge on an abusive and
tyrannical former official of the imperial state, the work depicts the break-
down of state power as well as the dissipation of the so-called “Japanese
spirit,” which leaves in its wake only a corporeal, material existence that is
described as a “grotesque, pulpy mass, like the entrails of a pig.”
Furthermore, the imprint of empire’s collapse is visible in the thematic of
“return,” which, as Kawamura Minato has stated, inaugurates postwar
writing.2 With some 6.5 million Japanese scattered throughout the battle-
fields, colonies, and occupied territories at the war’s end, the implosion of
empire set in motion a massive movement across vast spaces, as soldiers,
settlers, officials, and other civilians began a frantic scramble to return to the
Japanese islands. Meanwhile, millions of former colonial subjects dislocated
by the machinery of the imperial state and economy (including 1.35 million
Koreans in Japan at the war’s end) remained displaced and struggled to return
home. This wrenching dislocation of bodies and psyches left a deep imprint
on early postwar writings.
To illustrate this theme of return, Kawamura cites the haunting opening of
the widely read postwar novel by Takeyama Michio (1903–84), Biruma no
tategoto (The Harp of Burma, 1948), which takes the form of a story told by a
soldier returning from the battlefield: “Our Japanese soldiers who came back
from overseas were a pitiful sight. They looked thin, weak, and exhausted.”
In addition, one could also cite Ōoka Shōhei’s (1909–88) Nobi (Fires on the
Plain, 1951), the story of a soldier’s harrowing descent into madness in the
closing days of the war, narrated from the confines of a psychiatric institution
on the outskirts of Tokyo upon his return to Japan. In turn, Hayashi Fumiko’s

2
See Kawamura Minato, Sengo bungaku o tou (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 1–12.

687
 seiji m. lippit

(1903–51) epic novel Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1949–51) opens with the scene
of Yukiko’s arrival at a repatriation center in the town of Tsuruga, returning
from Dalat in French Indochina (present-day Vietnam), where she had
worked as a secretary for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in the
last years of the war.
In each of these cases, however, the act of return is haunted by the essential
impossibility of its completion. Mizushima, the protagonist of Takeyama’s
novel, in fact refuses to return to Japan, abandoning his unit and remaining in
Burma as a Buddhist monk in order to mourn for the soldiers lost in battle. In
Fires on the Plain, Tamura’s horrific experiences of slaughter and cannibalism
have cost him his sanity, and he continually relives his trauma, ordered to
recollect his experiences by one of the doctors. Despite his physical return to
Japan, psychologically and emotionally he remains on the battlefields of the
Philippines. In the case of Yukiko in Drifting Clouds, upon her return to Tokyo
she confronts a faded nation that has been shorn of its colonial possessions,
reduced to the “the trunk of its body, having in its defeat lost Korea, Taiwan,
the Ryūkyū Islands, Sakhalin, Manchuria, all of it.” She experiences this
dismemberment of the empire as a fundamental deformation of the national
corpus, and she spends the remainder of the narrative trying desperately and
unsuccessfully to recapture the fantasy of colonial life that she had experi-
enced during the war.
In fact, as Kawamura points out, those who returned to Japan experienced
a radical sense of disjunction between the image they held in their minds and
the transformed place they actually encountered: an occupied, bombed-out
state shorn of its empire. The sense of spatial dislocation and the reconfigura-
tion of national borders is, for example, visible in Takeda’s Hikarigoke
(Luminous Moss, 1954), in which the narrator stands at the national border
in a coastal Hokkaidō town, looking at a formerly Japanese island, now
foreign territory. The postwar return was, in essence, an impossible task:
not only because many who were overseas never made it to the Japanese
islands, or because there were some colonial settlers who were “returning” to
a place they had never known, but rather because the end of the war marked
a fundamental transformation in national consciousness.
The sense of being thrown outside the familiar strictures of state and
society was an unsettling, terrifying experience, as well as one loaded with
utopian possibilities for the future. The literature of ruin found its expression
in many forms: the narrative and poetic accounts of the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Shiina Rinzō’s (1911–73) literature of the physical
and spiritual ruins of Tokyo; Tamura Taijirō’s (1911–83) “literature of the

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 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

flesh” set in the ruined capital; the literature of fallenness or decadence of

Sakaguchi Ango (1906–55). For writers such as Tamura and Ango, the fall into
the depths of postwar ruin also signified the possibility of rebirth, the
emergence of a new conception of humanity.
Soon, however, the sense of dislocation and the disjunction that existed
between the imperial state and the postwar nation-state would be obscured
within the process of postwar reconstruction. As Takeda notes in “On Ruin,”
the sense of being thrown into an abject materiality was followed by a
temptation to forget the experience of total ruin. Remarking that at some
point he found his extreme state of mind turning toward thoughts of “every-
day preparations,” Takeda writes: “The reason that I stop thinking about ruin
is due to a simple laziness, cowardice, and forgetfulness. The profundity that
ruin maintains runs too deep for me, and I find myself unable to bear the
vertigo that I feel when I stand at its primal precipice and look back at the
path of culture.”
Part of this attempt to overcome the postwar rupture involved the forma-
tion of new discourses of national collectivity that sutured the disjunction
between past and present. Perhaps the most prominent example can be
found in the rising currency of discourses of national identity based on ethnic
homogeneity, which, as Oguma Eiji has shown, displaced conceptions of the
multiethnic imperial state that had previously been a dominant force in
official accounts of Japanese identity. In the postwar period, the work of
Kim Tal-su (1919–97) can be seen to inscribe the effects of this discursive re-
centering of national collectivity. Thus Kim’s story “Fuji no mieru mura de”
(A Village in View of Mount Fuji, 1951) narrates an encounter with the
resurgent borders of ethnic community, which push to the margins any
alternative political associations. The story describes a visit by a group of
Korean intellectuals to the family home of a burakumin, or “outcaste,”
intellectual, where they expect to find a sense of political solidarity, but
instead meet only with naked racism.
Yet the rise of new conceptions of national collectivity, which displaced the
memory of the multiethnic imperial state to forge phantasmatic continuities
with the past, were also met by various counter-movements, attempts to
preserve not only the memory of empire, but, perhaps more importantly, the
experience of rupture that the collapse of the imperial state represented. For
example, the postwar oeuvre of Hayashi Fumiko and Hotta Yoshie (1918–98)
can be seen to revolve around the memory of empire and the inextricable
intertwining of continuities and discontinuities in postwar Japan under
occupation. Like Takeda, Hotta was living in Shanghai at war’s end, and

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his postwar consciousness was shaped by the experience of imperial collapse

and his return to a transformed Japan under occupation, which he articulated
as a deep fissure in consciousness. In the postwar period, Hotta published a
wide range of fiction, including a series of narratives about exiles living in
wartime Shanghai, novels exploring the topography of wartime and postwar
Tokyo, and historical fiction based on events such as the Siberian expedition
and the Nanjing massacre.
The common thread in this diverse set of writings is the depiction of
various spaces of occupation, ranging from Shanghai and Nanjing under
Japanese control to occupied Tokyo. In his novel Jikan (Time, 1955), Hotta
depicts the split subjectivity of Chen, a Chinese resident of Nanjing whose
home has been taken over by a Japanese officer and who outwardly collabo-
rates with the occupation while simultaneously maintaining a clandestine
resistance. This characterization echoes the divided consciousness of his
earlier “Kage no bubun” (Shadow Pieces, 1952), in which Hotta presents a
narrative of two inhabitants of Tokyo under Allied occupation. One is a
beggar who wanders the city streets warning of impending nuclear apoca-
lypse, bearing on his body the marks of war, defeat, and occupation. The
other is an office worker whose outwardly calm and quotidian existence,
consumed with “everyday trivialities,” conceals the lingering traumas of a
continuous series of occupations: “His life had been occupied by conflicts,
occupied by war, and occupied by the Occupation; occupied by school,
occupied by the army and occupied by his firm.” Ultimately, the two figures
are shown to be one and the same; their differing relations to the past, of both
remembrance and forgetting, are merely two sides of occupied Japan. In this
way, Hotta’s works enfold a history of the prewar to postwar periods that is
defined by the repetition of occupation, first by the Japanese militarist state
and subsequently by the Allied authorities.
Hayashi Fumiko, whose prewar and wartime experience was defined by
continual movement through various social spaces of urban and rural Japan
as well as through battlefields and occupied territories, narrated the experi-
ence of return to a defeated nation in Drifting Clouds. The heroine of this
novel, Yukiko, tries to recapture the sense of luxury and exalted status that
the colonial project afforded her. Yet in the ruins of the imperial capital, the
colonial fantasy proves elusive, and Yukiko is instead faced with a realization
that the emergent neocolonial order now places her in the position of the
colonized. When she converses in English with an American soldier near the
Shinjuku black market, she enjoys the memory of her colonial experience:
“Yukiko sensed a return of her life in Dalat, when she used to speak to the

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 From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

Annamese with a mixture of French and English, and she spoke a few halting
words.” Yet she also becomes aware of her essential similarity to Niu, the
Annamese mistress of the Japanese official Tomioka during the war. In
Drifting Clouds, the postwar black market serves as a space of exchange, in
which the remnants and fragments of Japanese empire are converted into the
postwar order, mediating between the vast imperial topography of the early
twentieth century and the delimited space of the postwar nation-state.
Hayashi’s novel provides one illustration of the ways in which the after-
effects of the expansion and implosion of empire permeated the spatial
imaginary of postwar literature.

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 72
Japanese literature and cinema from the
1910s to the 1950s
hirokazu toeda

In December of 1895, the Lumière brothers first displayed their

Cinématographe in Paris. Approximately one year later, film arrived in
Japan. Though it was initially valued for its documentary function in photo-
graphing local people and scenery, it soon began to draw subject matter from
performing arts and sideshow entertainment: the oldest surviving Japanese
film is Momijigari (Maple Viewing, 1899, first shown publicly in 1903), a record
of a performance by the kabuki actors Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1838–1903) and
Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903).
In the essay collection Byōshō rokushaku (Six-foot Sickbed, 1902), Masaoka
Shiki gave katsudō shashin (moving pictures) as the first item in a list of “things
I haven’t seen but would like to.” It is probably no accident that the writer
who promoted the technique of “sketching” (shaseibun) in the reformation of
the haiku should be so interested in film. Shiki’s close friend Natsume Sōseki
commented in “Bungaku zatsuwa” (Miscellaneous Remarks on Literature,
1908) that, “if shaseibun is a panorama, the novel is a moving picture.” At the
same time, he would later remark in the lecture “Nakami to keishiki”
(Content and Form, 1911) that he had “never particularly liked these things
called moving pictures.” As suggested by the term “moving pictures,” this
medium, still new to Japan, was often treated as a kind of sideshow entertain-
ment, and to the authors of the Meiji period, who had just begun pursuing
literature as an earnest artistic activity, it remained an unfamiliar medium.
However, as films became longer, they came to make use of stories created
by contemporary authors. As early as the 1910s, domestic novels such as
Kikuchi Yūhō’s (1870–1947) Ono ga tsumi (One’s Own Sin, 1899–1900) and
Yanagawa Shun’yō’s (1886–1965) Nasanu naka (The Stepchild, 1912–13) pro-
vided fitting material for the so-called shinpa (new school) films: contempor-
ary melodramas that drew inspiration from the shinpa theater. Films would
continue to be produced based on stories taken from popular novels into the
Taishō period and beyond, including film adaptations of Kikuchi Kan’s

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popular novels. At the same time, starting in the late Meiji period, a number
of authors appeared whose writings were shaped by an awareness of filmic
expression.
Throughout the late Meiji and Taishō periods, movie theaters gradually
grew in number around Tokyo’s Asakusa entertainment district. Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), who began writing in the same period, often wrote
these spaces into his early fiction. “Himitsu” (The Secret, 1911) is set in the
labyrinthine streets of Tokyo’s Shitamachi area around 1910, still in the wake of
the Russo-Japanese War; the last remnants of Edo linger in the narrow streets,
with the newly built movie theater becoming a symbol of the transformation
of the capital’s commercial districts in the face of modernization.
As I came from the Twelve-stories to the edge of the pond and emerged onto
the intersection by the Operakan playhouse, the decorative lighting and the
arc lamps glistened on my heavily made-up face and cast the patterns of my
kimono into clear relief. When I arrived in front of the Tokiwaza theater, I
saw the image of my figure, splendidly transformed into a woman, reflected
amid the bustling crowds in the entryway mirror of a photographer’s studio.

Wandering at night through Asakusa while dressed as a woman, the prota-

gonist finds his own reflection beneath “the decorative lighting and the arc
lamps” and praises himself for having “splendidly transformed into a
woman.” In the background are the Asakusa theaters: the Operakan and
the Tokiwaza. The Ryōunkaku tower, referred to by Tanizaki as the
“Twelve-stories,” was the major landmark of Asakusa until the Great
Kantō Earthquake, while the decorative lighting that illuminates Tanizaki’s
nighttime streets had been unveiled to popular acclaim in the nearby Ueno
Park for the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition of 1907. In the Asakusa of “Himitsu,”
dedicated movie theaters like the Operakan and San’yūkan have begun to
increase in number alongside earlier stage theaters like the Tokiwaza,
Ichimuraza, Ryūseiza, and Miyatoza. One night, about a week after the
protagonist’s “splendid transformation” in the passage above, he makes his
way to the San’yūkan. There, intoxicated by the image of his own transvestite
figure amid the play of light and shadow and the intermingled gaze of men
and women, he happens to meet a certain woman, referred to as T, with
whom he had formerly been romantically involved. Faced with defeat in a
“contest of femininity” with a woman whose beauty rivals that of a film
actress, he resolves to give up his cross-dressing habit. Against the backdrop
of the projection screen, the protagonist, whose transvestitism recalls the
kabuki onnagata (female impersonator), faces off against T, who resembles a

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film actress, and T is the victor. Using the movie theater as his setting,
Tanizaki wrote this piece roughly ten years before female actresses would
appear in Japanese film.
Another work that suggests Tanizaki’s sensitivity to the evolving geogra-
phy of Tokyo movie theaters is “Jinmenso” (The Tumor with a Human Face,
1918), a supernatural story written seven years after “Himitsu,” in which
Tanizaki experimented with the incorporation of filmic techniques into his
fiction. Whereas the theaters of “Himitsu” are the newly built facilities of
Asakusa, the ones in “Jinmenso” are those spreading to what were at the time
the Tokyo suburbs. References to the theaters of Shibuya and Shinjuku, then
considered the “outskirts of Tokyo,” appear as early as the opening sentence.
Utagawa Yurie had in recent days heard from two or three sources a strange
rumor – that a certain terribly strange film, a mysterious drama in which she
played the leading role, had been recently playing at some not particularly
well known theaters in Shinjuku and Shibuya and was now making the
rounds of the outskirts of Tokyo.

This opening impressively captures a moment in which, in a background of

increasing urban migration, Tokyo’s residential and commercial districts
were reaching into the suburbs and new theaters were being built in
response. There are many points of interest, such as the fact that a super-
natural urban legend surrounding the film actress Utagawa Yurie is intro-
duced as a “rumor” circulating in the Tokyo suburbs, and the suggestion
that a film “making the rounds of the outskirts of Tokyo” through the
distribution of the “Globe Company” has been circulating not only within
Tokyo but also outside of Japan, in a larger global system. More immediate,
however, is Tanizaki’s acute awareness of the spread of movie theaters to
the Tokyo suburbs. Tanizaki correctly grasped and incorporated into his
fiction a contemporary moment in which, from the late Meiji into the
Taishō period, movie theaters were spreading from the center of Tokyo
to the city’s suburbs, with new facilities being built in Shinjuku, Shibuya,
Aoyama, Shinagawa, Sugamo, and other such places. Utagawa Yurie’s
image is photographed, edited, and distributed through these increasing
numbers of theaters, to the point at which the actress herself is astonished
and disoriented by the multiplication of her own image beyond her under-
standing or control.
During the Taishō period, other novelists also wrote on the topic of film.
Satō Haruo’s (1892–1964) “Shimon” (Fingerprint, 1918) also uses the setting of
a movie theater and incorporates filmic techniques of expression. In

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Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s (1892–1927) “Katakoi” (Unrequited Love, 1917), the

female protagonist falls in love with the image of a foreign actor, while
“Kage” (Shadow, 1920) tells the story of a schizophrenic Chinese man whose
relationship with his doppelganger is overlaid on the events of a film. Shortly
before his death, Akutagawa would also produce “Yūwaku” (Temptation,
aka San Sebastian, 1927), with the subtitle “a screenplay,” as well as “Asakusa
Kōen” (Asakusa Park, 1927). Unfolding at roughly the same time, the series of
exchanges between Akutagawa and Tanizaki known collectively as the
“plotless novel” debate closely mirrored contemporary discourse on film,
shaped by two competing trajectories: on one hand, the pursuit of experi-
mentation by avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, and on the other, a
tendency to rely increasingly heavily on narrative.
In the 1920s, as the silent film came into maturity and avant-garde films
arrived from Europe and America, the interaction between literature and film
began in earnest. In 1920, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō began working as a script
consultant for Taishō Moving Picture Corporation (Taikatsu), where
Thomas Kurihara (1885–1926), recently returned from Hollywood, produced
the film Amachua kurabu (Amateur Club, 1920) based on Tanizaki’s script.
This collaboration accelerated the so-called Pure Film Movement (Jun-eiga-
geki undō), but Tanizaki would soon distance himself from film, and the
movement would draw to a close in a mere two years.
In 1926, Kinugasa Teinosuke (1896–1982), having recently left Makino
Productions, banded together with the group of writers surrounding the
journal Bungei jidai – the so-called “New Sensationist School” (shinkankaku-
ha), which included such writers as Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), Kawabata
Yasunari (1899–1972), Kataoka Teppei (1894–1944), and Kishida Kunio (1890–
1954) – to form the New Sensationist Film Alliance (Shinkankaku-ha Eiga
Renmei). Inspired by recent Western films like Robert Wiene’s Das Kabinett
des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) and F. W. Murnau’s Der
Letzte Mann (The Last Man, aka The Last Laugh 1924), the group released its
first film, Kurutta ippēji (A Page of Madness, 1926), within a year. In order to
render the world of the human mind into visual images, this film completely
eschewed inter-titles, emphasized the contrast between light and shadow,
and used extremely short cuts, flashbacks, close-ups, and multiple exposures,
all of which created a distinctive visual rhythm and effect. This work,
reminiscent of German Expressionist film, is representative of Japanese
avant-garde film in the 1920s, in which serious writers and filmmakers
collaborated to create a new form of art and blazed a trail for Japan’s postwar
avant-garde filmmakers. Kinugasa drew ideas for his expressive techniques

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from Yokomitsu’s fiction, while Yokomitsu and Kawabata went on to write

with an even deeper awareness of the medium of film.
In Yokomitsu’s case, these influences can be seen in works such as Shanghai
(1928–31), a full-length novel that takes place in the titular international metro-
polis, and “Kikai” (Machine, 1930), an experimental story that uses extremely
long sentences and avoids paragraph breaks in order to represent a stream of
human consciousness in the first person. In Kawabata’s case, characteristic
works include Asakusa kurenaidan (Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 1929–30), an urban
novel about Tokyo’s largest entertainment district, and “Suishō gensō”
(Crystal Phantasm, 1931), a short story that follows the psychological move-
ments of its unnamed housewife protagonist from a first-person perspective.
Following the initial serialization of Asakusa kurenaidan in the Asahi shinbun
from December 1929 through February 1930, Kawabata’s work was adapted by
director Takami Sadae for Teikoku Kinema; the film was released in
September 1930, and Kawabata published the remainder of the novel in the
journals Kaizō and Shinchō later the same month.
In 1930, the publisher Shinchōsha’s annual literary yearbook Bungei nenkan
declared that, “Beginning this year, there is a sense that perhaps the film and
literary worlds have entered into a state of even closer relation and negotia-
tion.” Beginning around 1930, issues surrounding the relationship between
literature and film became a major topic of literary reflection. The writer/
critic Itō Sei (1905–69), influenced deeply by film, wrote to Kawabata in 1930
to express his “pessimism” that “literature absolutely cannot compete with
film,” as well as his “firm belief” in the uniqueness of literature. Yokomitsu
meanwhile wrote to Hori Tatsuo (1904–53) in 1930 that at present there were
two kinds of writers: those in whom contact with film had inspired an
ambition for further creativity and those whom it had brought stagnation.
Indeed, one of the common trajectories of writers of this period was to be
inspired by film to write fiction, and then, in response to a pessimistic sense
that literature could not compete with film, to arrive at a new discovery of
what was distinctive about literary expression.
Experiments with cinematic techniques like close-ups and flashbacks can
be seen in the early fiction of Hori Tatsuo, beginning with “Bukiyōna tenshi”
(A Clumsy Angel, 1929). Hori was also influenced to a significant degree by
Jean Cocteau, the French poet and director of the film Le Sang d’un poète (The
Blood of a Poet, 1930), whose works he translated for publication as Kokutō-
shō (Cocteau Collection, 1929).
Inspired by the avant-garde film movements carried out by the French
Surrealists in the wake of the First World War, experiments with poetic

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visuality such as the “cine-poem” helped to shape the Japanese poetry of the
1920s. For example, visual poems like Takenaka Iku’s (1904–82) “Ragubı̄”
(Rugby, 1929) and “Hyakkaten” (Department Store, 1929) and Kondō
Azuma’s (1904–88) “Gunkan” (Battleship, 1928) were composed with refer-
ence to film scenarios. When film entered the talkie era in the 1930s, figures
like Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–90) created a “screenplay literature move-
ment” that emphasized the value of the screenplay as a genre of literary art.
Print media were actively incorporating writing about film at this time:
film journals like Eiga ōrai (Film Dispatch, 1925) and Eiga jidai (The Age of
Film, 1926) began publication, while newspapers, literary journals, and gen-
eral interest magazines incorporated vibrant film columns. Between the late
Taishō and early Shōwa periods, as symbolized by the nearly synchronous
appearance of the journals Bungei jidai (The Literary Age, 1924), Gikyoku jidai
(The Age of Theater, 1924), and Eiga jidai – the name of each suggesting that
its titular medium was the favored child of the age – literature, theater, and
film developed in parallel and through mutual interaction.
In the 1930s, as the talkies came to displace the silent films of the earlier era,
new relations emerged between film and literature. Following Japan’s first
talkie, Gosho Heinosuke’s (1902–81) Madamu to nyōbō (The Neighbor’s Wife
and Mine, 1931), the talkies gradually increased in number, but silent films did
not disappear all at once. Since the audio of the early talkies was often
unclear, many viewers still preferred to listen to the explanations of the
benshi (the oral lecturers who had provided explanation, narration, and dialog
for films of the silent era), and it was only with the gradual advance of audio
technology that the talkies became more widespread. By the mid 1930s,
works by writers like Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Ozaki
Shirō (1898–1964) were being adapted one after another in a wave of “literary
films” (bungei eiga) that included Gosho’s Koi no hana saku: Izu no odoriko (The
Flower of Love Blooms: The Dancing Girl of Izu, aka The Izu Dancer, 1933,
adapted from Kawabata’s 1926 work), Shimazu Yasujirō’s (1897–1945)
Shunkinshō: Okoto to Sasuke (A Portrait of Shunkin: Okoto and Sasuke, 1935,
adapted from Tanizaki’s 1933 novella), and Uchida Tomu’s (1898–1970) Jinsei
gekijō (The Theater of Life, 1936, adapted from Ozaki Shirō’s 1933 novel).
As Japanese filmmakers moved to the era of the talkie, the greatest
challenge for filmmakers was dialog and its enunciation. During the transi-
tion to the talkie, Shōchiku studio head Kido Shirō (1895–1977) and director
Shimazu Yasujirō (usually credited with the establishment of the early
Shōchiku style) set to work studying the plays of Kishida Kunio and Kikuta
Kazuo (1908–73), especially the former’s one act plays such as Buranko (Swing,

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1925), Kami fūsen (Paper Balloons, 1925), and Hazakura (Cherry Tree in Leaf,
1926). As a result of these explorations, Shōchiku’s Tonari no Yae-chan (Our
Neighbor, Miss Yae, 1934), written, adapted, and directed by Shimazu, was a
great hit and became one of Shōchiku’s best-regarded films of the era.
Kishida, recently returned from a period of study in France, had in the mid
1920s written critical works like Warera no gekijō (Our Theater, 1926) that
argued for the importance of dialog and for a dramaturgy that emphasized
the role of the actress. This kind of actress-centric dramaturgy is one of the
reasons why Shōchiku’s films during the 1930s were considered primarily to be
women’s films. By this time, Shōchiku had established a system of production
in which the producer rather than the director held the ultimate creative
authority, and it was through such authority that Shōchiku’s producers turned
many early stage actresses into film stars: Kurishima Sumiko (1902–87), Tanaka
Kinuyo (1909–77), Kawasaki Hiroko (1912–76), Kuwano Michiko (1915–46), and
Takasugi Sanae (1918–95). Due largely to the popularity of these actresses,
Shōchiku films were able to draw large female audiences, forming a broader
viewer base. This female-centric film culture, often called the Shōchiku
Kamata-Ōfuna style, in reference to the studios where it was established,
came to define Shōchiku film both for filmmakers and for audiences.
Yokomitsu’s Kazoku kaigi (Family Conference, 1935), serialized in the Tokyo
Nichi Nichi and Osaka Mainichi newspapers, was adapted to the screen by
Shimazu Yasujirō in 1935. Later, Kishida Kunio’s Danryū (Warm Current,
1938), also serialized in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi and Osaka Mainichi newspapers,
was adapted in 1939 by Shimazu’s protégé Yoshimura Kōzaburō (1911–2000)
and became one of Shōchiku’s hit films. Many of Kawabata Yasunari’s works
were adapted to the screen as well. After Takami Sadae’s 1930 adaptation of
Asakusa kurenaidan, Kawabata’s novels were adapted one after another into
films like Gosho Heinosuke’s Koi no hana saku: Izu no odoriko (1933), Katsu’ura
Sentarō’s Minakami shinjū (Love Suicide at Minakami, 1934), Naruse Mikio’s
(1905–69) Otomegokoro san shimai (Three Maiden Sisters, 1935) based on
Kawabata’s Asakusa no shimai (Sisters of Asakusa, 1932), Sasaki Yasushi’s
(1908–93) Maihime no koyomi (Calendar of a Dancing Girl, 1935), and
Shimizu Hiroshi’s (1903–66) Arigatō-san (Mr. Thank You, 1936), based on
Kawabata’s “Arigatō” (Thank You, 1925).
Yukiguni (Snow Country, 1935–47), which was written almost simulta-
neously with its film adaptation, was informed by Kawabata’s deep aware-
ness of the medium of film. In the novel’s famous opening sentence – “The
train came out of the long border tunnel into snow country” – the movement
of the train from a dark space into an alternative world of light suggests the

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beginning of a film, with the darkness of the theater giving way as a new
fantasy world is projected on the silver screen. As the scene unfolds and the
reader is drawn into the phantasmal “snow country,” Kawabata’s narrator
explores the metaphors that link this world to the experience of film.
In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape flowed past, the reflecting
surface and reflected images moving like a doubly exposed film. There was
no connection between character and background. The characters were
transparent and without substance, the scenery a hazy current of dusk, and
as these two melted into one another, an otherworldly symbolic realm came
into view.

The rectangular window of the locomotive looks out to the outside world,
and through this lens one is able to experience the phantasmal world on the
other side. Seen through a cinematic simile that identifies the image in the
window with “a doubly exposed film,” the interior of the train car begins
to resemble the space of the theater, where one can experience another world
by watching moving images projected on the screen. Soon thereafter, the
evening scenery outside the train overlaps with Yōko’s reflection, and
the narrator explains their interaction in terms of a projected image (eizō):
“the image projected onto the mirror lacked the strength to overpower the
lights outside, but neither would those lights overpower the image.”
Kawabata, who from the beginning of his career had been partial to depicting
a “symbolic realm” in which distinctions between subject and object were
dissolved, here deploys the motif of the filmic image to depict the fusion of
interior and exterior worlds. This motif is repeated in the climax of the work,
when the events of a fire on the ground are projected against the Milky Way
above – the superimposition of heaven and earth – while, in the cocoon
storehouse, fire bursts from the film itself.
The works adapted as literary films during this period were of course not
limited to those of so-called “pure literature” but also included many works
of popular fiction. For example, serial works like Nakazato Kaizan’s (1885–
1944) Daibosatsu tōge (The Great Boddhisattva Pass, 1913–41) and Yoshikawa
Eiji’s (1892–1962) Miyamoto Musashi (Miyamoto Musashi, 1935–9), first adapted
by Inagaki Hiroshi (1905–80), became hugely popular period films and would
go on to be remade by many later directors.
With the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937 and the eruption of the
war in China, Japan’s domestic policy likewise moved increasingly toward
militarism. Following the promulgation and enactment of the Film Law in
1939 and the tightening of state controls over media, national policy films

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made up the majority of film production. Among these were literary adapta-
tions, including the extremely popular Aizen katsura series (The Love-Troth
Tree, 1938), based on a work by Kawaguchi Matsutarō (1899–1985) and
adapted in four parts by Nomura Hiromasa (1905–79).
Kumagai Hisatora (1904–86) directed a 1938 adaptation of Mori Ōgai’s “Abe
ichizoku” (The Abe Clan, 1913) before moving on to shoot documentary war
films like Shanhai rikusentai (The Naval Brigade at Shanghai, 1939). Tasaka
Tomotaka (1902–74), similarly, moved from human dramas like Shinjitsu
ichiro (One Path of Truth, 1937) and Robō no ishi (A Pebble by the Wayside,
1938), both adaptations of works by Yamamoto Yūzō (1887–1974), to the
massive war film Tsuchi to heitai (Dirt and Soldiers, 1939), based on Hino
Ashihei’s (1907–60) novel of the same name. Yamamoto Kajirō (1902–74)
likewise began the war with adaptations like Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu (The
Composition Class, 1938, based on a work by Toyoda Masako [1922–2010])
and Tōjūrō no koi (The Loves of Tōjūrō, aka The Loves of a Kabuki Actor,
1938, based on a work by Kikuchi Kan [1888–1948]) but, following the out-
break of the war with America, directed the massively popular war epic
Hawai Marē oki kaisen (Sea War from Hawaii and Malaya, 1942).
Following the end of the Allied occupation and the liberation of Japanese
media from occupation censorship, Japanese film, as if in response to the
renewed popularity of Japanese literature, entered a postwar golden age. This
prosperity led in turn to the success of Japanese films at international film
festivals. Beginning with the success of Kurosawa Akira’s (1910–98) Rashōmon
(Rashomon, 1950) at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, films like Yoshimura
Kōzaburō’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, 1951), Mizoguchi Kenji’s
(1898–1956) Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of a Woman by Saikaku, aka The
Life of Oharu, 1952) and Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain, aka
Ugetsu, 1953), Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Jigokumon (The Gate of Hell, 1953),
Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), and Mizoguchi’s
Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff, 1954) met with high acclaim at the Venice
and Cannes festivals throughout the early 1950s. With the exception of
Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai, all of these films were based on works of
Japanese literature: some on classical works – Genji monogatari on Murasaki
Shikibu’s classic, Saikaku ichidai onna on Ihara Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai onna
(The Life of an Amorous Woman, 1686), and Ugetsu monogatari on Ueda
Akinari’s story collection of the same name (1776) – and others on major
works of modern literature – Rashōmon on Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s stories
“Rashōmon” (1915) and “Yabu no naka” (In a Grove, 1922), Jigokumon on
Kikuchi Kan’s stage play “Kesa no otto” (The Husband of Kesa, 1923), and

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Sanshō dayū on Mori Ōgai’s 1915 historical novel. Significantly, of the films to
meet with international acclaim, even those based on modern works were set
in Japan’s premodern past, and their success at such festivals is equally
indicative of the Orientalist gaze as it is of the high regard given these films
as works of art.
Major postwar authors like Mishima Yukio (1925–70) and Abe Kōbō (1924–
93) had their works adapted to the screen, but they also expressed a strong
interest in the production of film. The most famous of Mishima’s works to be
made into a film were Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956),
adapted by Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008) as Enjō (Conflagration, 1958), and
Kurahara Koreyoshi’s (1927–2002) 1967 adaptation of Ai no Kawaki (Thirst
for Love, 1950). Mishima’s own involvement in film production included
writing, producing, directing, and starring in the short film Yūkoku
(Patriotism, 1965), as well as his work as an actor in Masumura Yasuzō’s
(1924–86) Karakkaze yarō (Chilly Bastard, aka Afraid to Die, 1960), Fukasaku
Kinji’s Kurotokage (Black Lizard, 1968), and Gosha Hideo’s (1929–92) Hitokiri
(Assassin, aka Tenchu!, 1969). Abe, on the other hand, penned the screenplays
for a number of his own original works, working with the avant-garde
director Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927–2001) to create new experiments, includ-
ing Otoshiana (Pitfall, 1962), Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1962), Tanin
no kao (The Face of Another, 1964), and Moetsukita chizu (The Burned Map,
aka The Ruined Map or The Man without a Map, 1967). The postwar period
saw a new class of cross-media creators: authors who later became directors,
and film directors who became authors of fiction.

(Translated by Thomas Gaubatz)

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Modern drama
m. cody poulton

Though Japan possesses one of the richest theater traditions in the world,
drama was not regarded as a literary genre there until the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the West, where Aristotle and Shakespeare established drama
as an important literary genre, for Asian civilizations poetry and, to a lesser
extent, prose narrative were the only literary genres worth noting. However
great were the playwrights prior to Meiji, their plays were written in the
service of, and were secondary to, performance. Indeed, in traditional
Japanese theater, performers (usually actors, but also the gidayū, or chanters,
in the puppet theater) were more important than playwrights, and many
playwrights of traditional theater were performers too. To some extent this
tendency has carried on to the present day.
The “discovery” of drama as a literary genre was part and parcel of Meiji
Japan’s program of nation building. Iwakura Tomomi’s 1871–3 mission to the
USA and Europe noted the importance accorded by governments there to
the theater as a civilized entertainment and tool for diplomacy. During the
Edo era noh had served a similar function. Kabuki was by far more popular
and more accessible to European audiences, but its long association with
prostitution made it an object of embarrassment for a people eager to prove
to Westerners that they too had an advanced civilization. By the early 1870s,
efforts were made to clean up kabuki. Calls for theater reform typically came
from top down. When Japan’s first “modern” theater, the Shintomi-za,
opened in downtown Tokyo in 1878, actor Ichikawa Danjūrō (1839–1903)
vowed in its inaugural speech that he would clean kabuki of its filth and make
it a respectable art. His address was in fact written for him by Fukuchi Ōchi
(1841–1906), a powerful figure in government circles and later a prolific
playwright. One of Japan’s earliest interpreters of Western culture, Nishi
Amane (1829–97) – who introduced Aristotle’s Poetics to Japanese readers in
his Hyakugaku renkan (Encyclopedia, 1870–2) – likewise called kabuki a
“medium for the lewd and the base.” Attempts to raise drama into the

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ranks of a literary genre were driven by a quest for purity, both moral and
aesthetic.
By 1886 the theater reform (kairyō was a buzzword of the period) move-
ment had coalesced into the Society for Theater Reform (Engeki Kairyō Kai),
an organization comprised of powerful government officials. Prime Minister
Itō Hirobumi’s soon to be son-in-law Suematsu Kenchō was the Society’s
president. Suematsu spoke for the society when he advocated the abolition of
the onnagata (male specialists of female roles), hanamichi (a ramp running
through the auditorium used for actors’ entrances and exits), chobo (musical
and narrative accompaniment adopted from the puppet theater), and other
devices typical of kabuki.
Nevertheless, most of the reforms that the Society advocated seemed
cosmetic to Meiji intellectuals, who maintained that the Society was missing
the point by not focusing on the craft of writing plays. Nishi Amane’s most
brilliant student, Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), attacked the measures proposed by
the Society for Theater Reform, calling for the creation of what he called
“straight drama” (seigeki), to be distinguished from musical theater (gakugeki)
like opera or much kabuki. For Ōgai, real reform would come only when the
text became the most important element of the theatrical production. “First
the drama, then the performance,” Ōgai wrote in an essay “Surprised by the
Prejudice of Theater Reformers” (“Engeki kairyō no henken ni odoroku,”
1889). He called for “backstage poets” who would make dialogue the “mas-
ter” of the drama. Similarly, poet Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94) advocated the
excision of musical and choreographic elements from the new drama. His
Hōrai kyoku (Song of Penglai, 1891), which some regard as Japan’s first
modern play, was a dramatic poem written in classical Japanese, modeled
on Byron’s Manfred.
The most trenchant critic of the Society, however, was Tsubouchi
Shōyō (1859–1933), whose stature as a literary critic (established with
Shōsetsu shinzui [The Essence of the Novel] in 1885–6) was eclipsed by a
lifelong devotion to the theater. Besides translating all of Shakespeare’s
plays, Shōyō wrote extensively on both Japanese and Western theater,
composed his own historical and dance drama for the kabuki theater,
trained his own actors, and founded one of Japan’s first modern theaters,
the Bungei Kyōkai (Literary Society, established in 1906). A man with a foot
in both worlds, he saw Shakespeare as the fulcrum on which kabuki could
be transformed into a modern theater. In “Our Nation’s Historical Drama”
(Wagakuni no shigeki, 1893–4), Shōyō attacked the absurdities of tradi-
tional history plays (jidai-mono), advocating a clear distinction between

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dramatic and narrative modes, greater structural consistency, and deeper

psychological delineation of character. Kabuki ran the gamut of human
emotions in the course of a single play or performance, wrote Shōyō, with
“sudden swings from the severe to the salacious, to the refined and elegant,
now virtuous, now violent, now awesome, now weird, never just one
thing or another.”1 This, he acknowledged, was part of its pleasure, but the
traditional theater’s taste for variety over coherence was a mark of its
impurity and irrationality. As in his criticism on fiction, Shōyō would take
issues with attempts to make theater a didactic medium intended to create
better citizens. Characters like Iago or Shylock interest us not for their
moral qualities but rather because of their psychological complexity. Shōyō
was one of the first critics in the modern era to praise Chikamatsu’s
domestic plays (sewa-mono) for their attention to the daily lives of com-
moners over the extraordinary and spectacular exploits of the heroes and
villains of the history plays. This was reflective of a new interest in realism,
sparking the rehabilitation of Edo writers like Chikamatsu and Saikaku
while at the same time anticipating the rise of naturalism in the coming
decades.
Writers and critics in the Meiji era agreed that the literary status of the
dramatic script would have to be raised before a serious, modern theater
could be created in Japan; increasingly, playwrights would come from out-
side the world of kabuki, and actors would lose the control they once had
over the lines they spoke. Though there have been a number of excellent
modern kabuki playwrights (Hasegawa Shin [1884–1963] being one example),
it remained a theater largely resistant to change. Its successor, shinpa (a
melodramatic theater that had retained many elements of kabuki) was hardly
better. Modern drama (which came to be called shingeki, “new drama”)
necessitated a rejection of traditional models. The new drama would be
more logical, a mouthpiece for the playwright, and a forum for the explora-
tion of new ideas on society and human relations. Writing on the birth of
shingeki in Japan, novelist and playwright Mishima Yukio (1925–70) noted
that “modern life destroyed society’s conventional stereotypes of emotions”
which had been codified into the acting patterns (kata) of traditional theaters
like kabuki and shinpa; in shingeki the text and not the acting needed to
convey the new emotional realities. “The audience of shingeki,” Mishima

1
Tsubouchi Shōyō, “Wagakuni no shigeki” (Our Nation’s Historical Drama), in Nomura
Takashi and Fujiki Hiroyuki, eds., Kindai bungaku hyōron taikei, vol. 9, Engekiron (Tokyo:
Kadokawa Shoten, 1985), 51.

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 Modern drama

wrote, “comes to see a drama not to seek familiarity in acting patterns but to
be awakened from sleep.”2
That drama could be the consummate form for expressing ideas about
contemporary society was driven home to the Japanese with the first full
productions of works by European playwrights like Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart
Hauptmann, George Bernard Shaw, and Anton Chekhov in the first decade
of the twentieth century. Plays by Ibsen and Hauptmann, more than any
European fiction, were the true catalysts of the naturalist movement in Japan.
Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, first produced by Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) and
Ichikawa Sadanji II’s (1880–1940) Free Theater (Jiyū Gekijō) in 1909, and A
Doll’s House, staged by Shōyō and Shimamura Hōgetsu’s (1871–1918) Literary
Society in 1911, had a galvanizing effect on Japan’s youth, who questioned
parental authority and the role of women in modern society. In the following
decades, practically every writer in Japan experimented with drama. Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) started out as a playwright, a disciple of theater director
and critic Osanai Kaoru. Likewise, Ueda (Enchi) Fumiko (1905–86) made her
literary debut with a play in a production at Osanai’s Tsukiji Little Theater in
1928. Many other women, including Osanai’s elder sister Okada Yachiyo
(1883–1962), Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941), Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), and
Osaki Midori (1896–1971) would devote a considerable part of their early
careers to drama and theater. Theater historian Oyama Isao lists more than
eighty professional playwrights active before 1940.
Drama may have been a congenial genre for expression, but getting plays
staged was more difficult than publishing them as it required actors,
directors, and other theater artists with the skills to stage modern theater
and a regular paying audience to support the substantial expense of produc-
tion. Because of these factors, modern drama took longer to mature in
Japan than fiction or poetry. Osanai Kaoru, who until his death in 1928 was,
along with Shōyō, the spearhead for modern theater in Japan, alienated
many Japanese writers by consistently favoring productions of Western
plays. Many writers had to turn to kabuki or shinpa for productions of new
Japanese plays before eventually establishing their own independent thea-
ters in the 1920s and 30s.
The rhetoric of modernity resolved itself into two forms of verbal expres-
sion: monologue and dialogue. To a great extent, modernity in Japan was a
discovery of private life, what Karatani Kōjin has called interiority, and this
2
Mishima Yukio, “A Small Scar on the Left Kneecap,” from Backstage Essays, excerpted in
My Friend Hitler and Other Plays by Yukio Mishima, trans. and ed. Hiroaki Sato (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), 59.

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 m. cody poulton

tended to privilege fiction, especially confessional fiction, over the dialogic

nature of drama. The public nature of Edo culture is witnessed in the central
importance held by kabuki and other performing spoken arts like rakugo and
storytelling (kōdan). Maeda Ai pointed out that, as printed books became
more plentiful and literacy rose in the Meiji era, reading became a private
affair, which fundamentally changed the nature of literary expression and
public tastes. Given the collaborative nature of theatrical production and its
need for a public audience, theater remained a social art form even as its
public was turning increasingly to the more private pleasures of reading, and
various attempts were made in theater to compete with print literature by
stressing the importance of the text and downplaying its theatricality.
In the decades to follow, attempts were made to revive the lost sociality of
theatergoing by making it more politically topical. Osanai himself had writ-
ten that “theater’s instinct was to head for the outdoors,” a remark no doubt
instigated by a politicizing trend in 1920s Japanese society. Theater artists
were more successful in resisting political pressure than writers of fiction
through the 1920s and 30s, probably because of the solidarity afforded them
by theater companies. Even so, censorship and surveillance over the theater
was even stricter than over print literature. Two seats were reserved in every
theater for censors who could stop a production even if the script had prior
approval. Leftist playwrights and artists in Japan during this period often
resorted to the kind of impromptu performances at factories and street
corners, called “living newspapers,” where actors would extemporize over
contemporary events.
The language of modern Japanese drama, which mirrored the genbun-itchi
movement in fiction, also evolved gradually. Shōyō’s early translations
rendered Shakespeare into the style of jōruri puppet plays, and Tōkoku’s
and Ōgai’s first attempts at original drama were written in classical Japanese.
Dialogue drama in the modern vernacular did not appear until the first
decade of the twentieth century, and for a long time its style was burdened
by the influence of translated Western drama, witnessed in the work of
playwrights like Nagata Hideo (1885–1949) and Nakamura Kichizō
(1877–1941), who attempted to write problem plays in the style of Ibsen.
More successful in this style were writers like Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) and
Yamamoto Yūzō (1887–1974), who wrote about social issues such as deadbeat
dads and infanticide in thrillingly modern, dramatic dialogue.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, various literary styles and
movements had flooded into Japan from Europe. Naturalism may have had
the most immediate shock value, but European Symbolist and Expressionist

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theater also influenced the course of modern drama in Japan. The drames
statiques of the Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck inspired writers as
diverse as Ōgai, Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885–1945), Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939),
Kubota Mantarō (1889–1973), and Kinoshita Junji (1914–2006). Their plays
typically eschewed dramatic conflict, instead evoking through indirect and
lyrical language a particular mood or emotion. To some degree, such drama
was more congenial to the Japanese, who tend to avoid discord and direct
displays of emotion. This preference can be seen today in the so-called “quiet
theater” of playwrights like Matsuda Masataka (b. 1962) and Hirata Oriza (b.
1962). By contrast, the Expressionist dramas of Strindberg, Wedekind, and
Toller would have an impact on leftist writers like Murayama Tomoyoshi
(1901–77) in the 1920s.
Realism nonetheless became the dominant mode of modern drama in Japan
as in the West, giving rise to two camps: an apolitically inclined psychological
realism and a more politically motivated social or socialist realism. Shingeki
before and after the war remained strongly leftist in orientation (Kubo Sakae’s
[1900–55] Land of Volcanic Ash, 1938, is regarded as the pinnacle of socialist realist
drama in Japan), but with the death of Osanai Kaoru in 1928, many writers and
artists became disenchanted with ideological debates and sought to focus on
what they regarded as purely artistic standards of excellence. Arguably the
greatest playwright of this generation was Kishida Kunio (1890–1954), who had
studied under director Jacques Copeau in Paris in the early 1920s. A master
stylist of dialogue, Kishida created a body of work that with a Chekhovian
touch provided wry portraits of Japanese middle-class families struggling with
the clash of traditional and modern values. Together with fellow playwrights
Iwata Toyo’o (1893–1969; pen-name Shishi Bunroku) and Kubota Mantarō,
Kishida established the Literary Theater (Bungaku-za), Japan’s oldest existing
shingeki company, in 1937.
After 1945, only a few of Japan’s prewar playwrights and theater artists
managed to salvage their careers. Both Kishida and Kubo had written their
best work before the war. Kishida, like Kikuchi Kan, was ostracized by
colleagues due to his collaboration with militarists during the war, and
even the principled Kubo was unable to reconcile his ideals with the
compromises he had made in order to survive; he committed suicide in
1958. Some promising playwrights, like Morimoto Kaoru (1912–46), died
young. A few, like Kinoshita Junji, Miyoshi Jūrō (1902–58), and Tanaka
Chikao (1905–95), would write their best work in the postwar period. Next
to Kikuchi Kan’s Chichi kaeru (Father Returns, 1917) and Morimoto’s Onna
no isshō (A Woman’s Life, 1945), Kinoshita’s Yūzuru (Twilight Crane, 1948)

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 m. cody poulton

was the most frequently performed modern Japanese play of the twentieth
century. A new generation of playwrights came of age in the postwar
period, people like Fukuda Tsuneari (1912–94, who also translated
Shakespeare), Abe Kōbō (1924–93), Mishima Yukio, and Akimoto Matsuyo
(1911–2001). Director Senda Koreya’s (1904–94) criticism, translations, and
productions of Bertolt Brecht, much of which could not be produced until
after 1945, would influence the work of post-1960s playwrights like Satō
Makoto and Inoue Hisashi.
Abe’s plays in particular anticipated a disenchantment with old leftist
politics and the realist style in postwar Japan. The year 1960 marks the
tumultuous renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty as well as the first
production in Japan of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Theater had an
especially important role to play in the cultural and political ferment of this
decade. Young Japanese who came of age during this decade protested
Japan’s involvement as US ally in the Vietnam War, but also questioned
their own colonial history in Asia prior to 1945. Playwrights like Abe and
Betsuyaku Minoru (b. 1937) found absurdism more effective than realism
for the exploration of the shattering events of Japan’s twentieth century.
Betsuyaku’s early collaborations with director Suzuki Tadashi (b. 1939) at
the Waseda Little Theater, including such works as Zō (The Elephant,
1962) and Matchi-uri no shōjo (The Little Match Girl, 1966), explored the
traumatic aftermath of Hiroshima and the deprivations of Japan’s defeat.
Perhaps Japan’s greatest modern playwright, Betsuyaku was born and
raised in Manchuria and writes in a strangely deracinated Japanese; a
prolific playwright and essayist, his absurdist plays are both lyrical and
funny.
The artists of the avant-garde theater of this period (called angura, an
abbreviation of “underground”) soon found that the unconventional, inti-
mate spaces in which they were obliged to perform were excellent for
creating new dynamics between actors and audiences. Playwrights like
Kara Jūrō (b. 1940) and Satō Makoto (b. 1943) performed in tents pitched in
public spaces, evoking the carnival atmosphere that Kara believed was the
essence of early kabuki. Terayama Shūji (1935–83), a protean talent (poet,
playwright, photographer, director for stage and screen), undertook a radical
inquiry into the relationships between text, venue, actors, and audience,
creating with his company Tenjō Sajiki theater in the streets, parks, buses,
and even bathhouses. “The most important thing in dragging ‘drama’ outside
‘theater buildings’,” he wrote, “is removing the borderline between fiction
and reality. Drama must be at the same level as history, where fiction and

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reality are often ambiguous.”3 Terayama’s work (which captured the period’s
fascination with violence, the erotic, and the irrational) traced what became a
typical trajectory of post-1960s theater: away from plays as literary texts,
toward drama as a blueprint for performance. The turn from text not only
marked a new nativism in Japanese theater but also anticipated the rise of
performance and post-dramatic theater studies in the West, resulting in an
increasing focus on effects only live theater could manifest. (Antonin Artaud
was a seminal influence on artists like Terayama.) The fierce physicality of
modern Japanese performance is best exemplified in the butō style of dance
created by artists like Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–86) and Ōno Kazuo (1906–2010)
in the 1960s, or Suzuki Tadashi’s physically rigorous actors’ training method.
Much of the work created by playwrights like Terayama and Abe Kōbō in the
1970s, and Ōta Shōgo (1939–2007) in the 1990s, minimizes verbal expression to
explore the languages of movement, music, ambient sound, light, and
architectural form. Musical theater has undergone a resurgence, witnessed
by the ever-popular Takarazuka Revue; Saitō Ren’s (b. 1940) Shanghai Vance
King (1980) and much of Inoue Hisashi’s (1934–2010) work are fine examples of
this genre. In recent years, groups like Ku Na’uka, Dumb Type, Nibroll, and
Chelfitch have explored intriguing disjunctions between text, technology,
and the body. Osaka-based Ishinha’s grand spectacles, reminiscent of Robert
Wilson, use language musically, to create rap-like patterns that are a part of
the overall scenography.
Drama since the 1960s can be challenging for a reader and equally bewil-
dering for audiences. Kara Jūrō’s plays, for example, are as delightful to watch
as they defy interpretation; even his actors have trouble making sense of his
lines. Drama in this vein is typically non-linear, irrational, episodic, dream-
like, with shifting narrative lines and characters that trade on motifs of role-
play and metamorphosis, frequently transforming themselves into historic or
mythical figures. Such plays suggest a quest for yet deep distrust of transcen-
dent narratives, and a constant interrogation into the nature of identity,
memory, and reality.
With the exception of a few playwrights like Kawamura Takeshi (b. 1959)
and Tsuka Kōhei (1948–2010; he inspired a generation of other playwrights of
Korean ancestry, like Chong Wishing and Yu Miri), drama after the 1970s began
to lose its political edge. The speedy, noisy plays of Kōkami Shōji (b. 1958) and
Noda Hideki (b. 1955) in the 1980s signaled a depoliticization of the angura
3
Terayama Shūji, “The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea,” in Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei,
Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 287–8.

709
 m. cody poulton

aesthetic into mainstream entertainment and were emblematic of the celebra-

tory, narcissistic culture of Japan’s bubble years. Since the 1990s, ongoing
economic and political stagnation and disasters like the 1995 Kobe earthquake
and the Tokyo Sarin gas attack and, more recently, the 2011 Tōhoku earth-
quake and tsunami, have given rise to a more sober theater culture and a return
to realist, well-crafted plays, represented by playwrights like Nagai Ai (b. 1951)
and Hirata Oriza. Recent decades have also witnessed a renewed interest in
drama dealing with social and political issues, like shut-ins (hikikomori) in Sakate
Yōji’s (b. 1962) Yaneura (The Attic, 1995) and “freeters” (young casual laborers)
in Okada Toshiki’s (b. 1973) Enjoy (2008). Even the playful, ever popular Noda
has tackled contentious historical topics in more recent work like Oil (2003) and
Egg (2012). Over the course of fifty years Inoue Hisashi, who died in 2010, won
both commercial and critical success for his politically engaged, tragicomic
biographies, like Shimijimi Nippon Nogi Taishō (Earnest Japan: General Nogi,
1979) and Kumikyoku gyakusatsu (Massacre Rhapsody, 2009), based on the police
murder of leftist writer Kobayashi Takiji.
Finally, it should be mentioned that many stage playwrights have also
distinguished themselves as writers for cinema and/or television. Women
playwrights have especially been active in writing television drama, Hashida
Sugako’s (b. 1925) long-running series O-Shin (1983–4) being the most cele-
brated example.

710
 74
Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar
period
toshiko ellis

Modern Japanese poetic language passed through several phases in its

attempt to establish a modern style, models for which were sought in various
schools of modern European poetry. Through experimentation with various
rhythmic structures, inclining toward or moving away from the traditional
5–7 and 7–5 meter, and through the expression of new “modern” sensibilities,
integrating romantic themes and the tenets of symbolism, a new genre of
verse writing, kindaishi (modern poetry), was established. Roughly speaking,
the first half century after the Meiji Restoration can be seen as a period when
the aspiration to “modernize” constituted the predominant driving force for
poetic creation.
These early endeavors reached a culminating point with the publication of
Jashūmon (The Evil Faith, 1909) by Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942). Kitahara
aestheticized poetic language through the ingenious use of Chinese charac-
ters, combining the visual effects of the characters with the sound effects
of hiragana and katakana, creating an autonomous poetic space that was
imbued with a heavily symbolic and mystical atmosphere. “Ether” is written
as 依依児, with the reading eeteru in hiragana; 麻痺薬, meaning anesthetic,
is accompanied by the reading shibire-gusuri, literally meaning numbing
medicine. Sensual images abound, for example: “In the room, moisture
thickens in the twilight, the lily’s nectar decays with sweetness” (“Mitsu no
muro,” The Room of Nectar); this sensuality is often combined with exotic
images: “the quivering window, like the faint smile of the magical manor of
Arabia” (“Nōmu,” Thick Fog). Kitahara’s exploration of language and the
boldness with which he employed unconventional, entrancing images paved
the way for the birth of a new kind of poetry that dealt with imagery hitherto
foreign to the Japanese lyrical tradition.
It was also around this time that writing free verse in colloquial or semi-
colloquial Japanese quickly gained momentum. Nagai Kafū’s (1879–1959)
Sangoshū (Coral Collection), consisting of translations of modern French

711
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poetry, came out in 1913, and Takamura Kōtarō’s (1883–1956) Dōtei (Journey)
came out in 1914. Takamura, with his first-hand experience of being a
Japanese artist living in New York, London, and later Paris, epitomized
artistic and intellectual contact with contemporary European culture and
produced poems in lucid language, expressing his fascination with that
culture as well as his struggle to assert his identity as an “Oriental” man,
describing “a Japanese,” in “Netsuke no kuni” (The Land of Netsuke), as
being “like a monkey, like a fox, like a flying squirrel, like a gluttonous
goby, like a killifish, like a devil-shaped ridge-end tile, like a broken chip of a
tea bowl.”1
It was in 1917, however, that the major breakthrough in the development
of modern Japanese poetic language occurred, brought about by the publica-
tion of Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon) by Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–
1942). Grappling with the modern lyrical form, Hagiwara endeavored to
verbalize the “trembling of the nerves” through an appropriate “inner
rhythm,” to use the poet’s own words (“Tsuki ni hoeru jo,” Foreword to
Howling at the Moon, 1917). Hagiwara did not simply employ the modern
colloquial language but challenged it, cutting into the fabric of the dominant
standardized language, creating self-sustaining texts which presented them-
selves as unique verbal constructs that resisted being incorporated into the
discourse of everyday life.
The newness of Hagiwara’s verse and its distinct colloquial style were
intimately related to a sense of uneasiness and bewilderment in discovering
the modern subject. Alienation from the surrounding landscape, resulting
in the defamiliarization of that landscape, or of the subject itself, is a dominant
theme in Hagiwara’s early work, producing many images of the human body
on the verge of deterioration. Hagiwara’s second poetic collection, Aoneko (The
Blue Cat), published in 1923, has a similar feeling of alienation and physical
decay, though, in this collection the sense of languor and torpidity overwhelms
the theme of the subject in crisis. From “Namamekashii hakaba” (The Erotic
Cemetery):

And you, the lonely-looking phantom,

From the shade of your roaming body
Comes the smell of a rotten fish in the backstreets of an impoverished fishing
village

1
All translations of poetic texts are mine. I have given priority to giving a literal translation
so as to convey the original texture of the poem.

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 Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar period

For Hagiwara the uncertainty of the state of being was thematically inter-
twined with the sense of a loss of a place of belonging. This eventually led
him to pursue the theme of an eternal deprivation of homeland in his last
poetic collection, Hyōtō (Iceland, 1934).
Around the time Hagiwara was working on the poems of The Blue Cat, a
new generation of poets were opening up new arenas of poetic expression.
The domestic sociocultural setting for poetic creation was also undergoing a
marked change with the rise of mass culture centering in Tokyo, and to a
limited extent in Nagoya and Kobe. As Tokyo began to take on a new identity
that signified its connectedness with the contemporary metropolitan cultures
of Europe and America, a sense of contemporariness, a feeling that they were
working on the same ground as their fellow poets in the West, prevailed
among the younger poets born at around the turn of the century. Rather than
being “modernizers,” they looked at themselves as responding to the modern
society of which they were already part. The first to respond to the new
cultural environment of the early 1920s were the avant-garde poets, who
made their sensational debut with manifestos proclaiming the arrival of a
new age.
The earliest of these was “Mouvement Futuriste Japonais par R-Hyrato”
(The Japanese Futurist Movement Manifesto by R. Hirato), handed out by
the poet Hirato Renkichi (1893–1922) at a central street corner in mid-town
Tokyo in 1921. In 1923, a poetic magazine, Aka to kuro (Red and Black), edited
by a number of self-proclaimed avant-garde poets, appeared; on the cover of
its first issue, it claimed: “Poetry is a bomb! Poets are black criminals who
throw the bomb on the hard walls and doors of prison!” Below is the opening
of a poem entitled “Hibiya” by Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899–1938), one of the
founding members of this magazine, published in his first collection, Shikei
senkoku (Death Sentence) in 1925:
The intense rectangle
Chains and gunfire and conspiracy
Troops and gold and decoration and fame
Higher higher higher higher higher soaring higher
The central point of the capital – Hibiya
Located to the south of the Imperial Palace, together with the Police
Headquarters, the Marine Agency, and the House of Peers, the Hibiya district
represented the political, financial, and military center of modern Tokyo.
Significantly, it was at the Hibiya intersection that Hirato Renkichi stood to
hand out the futurist manifesto.

713
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With the visual effect of the vertical lines on the printed page (here
partially conveyed by the use of bold face), the poem aims to convey the
dynamic power emanating from this metropolitan center, amidst the swirl of
conspiracy and competition for “gold and decoration and fame.” Although
captivated by the power of this rapidly growing capital, the text enfolds
another message: this intense center is also full of “pitfalls,” where “laborers
of intelligence” are exploited and buried.
The latter half of the 1920s is the period in modern Japanese poetic history
for which the descriptive term “internationalism” would be most fitting. This
was reinforced by influential figures who had spent a substantial period of time
overseas, and who, upon their return to Japan, published up-to-date remarks
on the literary scene in contemporary Europe and actively produced transla-
tions. Horiguchi Daigaku (1892–1981), the son of a diplomat who had spent
many years of his youth in major European cities, was one notable figure; his
landmark collection of French poetry in translation, Gekka no ichigun (Richness
under the Moonlight), was published in 1925. The collection included 340 pieces
by sixty-six poets, selected by Horiguchi to provide an overview of modern
French poetry, from Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine to Paul Valéry,
Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, and the more recent works of Francis
Picabia and Yvan Goll. Horiguchi was a versatile translator, using both classical
and colloquial Japanese, skillfully adopting different styles to bring out the
texture of the original. The kaleidoscopic presentation of this collection opened
new ground in poetic creation, particularly in disseminating the “l’esprit
nouveau” sensibility that contributed strongly to the flourishing of modernist
poetry toward the end of the 1920s.
Another influential figure was Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), who is
also known as one of the earliest surrealist poets in Japan. After having
studied at Oxford, Nishiwaki returned to Japan in 1926 to take up a position
as professor in English Literature at a private university in Tokyo. In 1927 he
published Fukuikutaru kafu yo (Oh, the Fragrant Stoker), the first surrealist
anthology in Japan. One of Nishiwaki’s students, Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–79),
later became the central figure in the exploration of surrealist theory in Japan.
At around the same time, Anzai Fuyue (1898–1965) and a group of young
poets living in Dalian, a port city at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula handed
over to Japan by Russia after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), were embark-
ing on a poetic enterprise of their own through a small journal called A: the
first character of “Asia” in Japanese. Embracing their ambivalence toward the
landscape of a newly colonized area, a former Chinese village developed by
the Russians on the Parisian model and only half-built at the time of the

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 Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar period

Japanese take-over, the poets of A produced works featuring stillness of

imagery, detachment, and economy of words, as in the following lines:
“The city is being folded. / Banks go bankrupt, the canal turns pale”
(“Neko,” A Cat, A, no. 16, January 1926).
Thirty-five issues of A were published between 1924 and 1927, and copies
circulated among the poetic milieux in Tokyo. The newness of imagery and
its formalistic approach contributed to the creation of a specific modernist
sensibility and prepared the ground for the publication of what came to be
known as the representative of “l’esprit nouveau,” the modernist poetic
journal Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics), in 1928. Anzai was one of its eleven
founding members, together with Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–90), who had
also been a member of A for the first couple of issues. Poetry and Poetics marks
the height of high modernism in Japanese poetry, publishing fourteen full
volumes until 1931. It was renamed Bungaku (Literature) in 1932, and six more
volumes were published up to 1933. Each volume of Poetry and Poetics
consisted of at least two hundred pages, elaborately bound and systematically
divided into sections on essays, creative work, and critical notes. The journal
functioned as a central vehicle for introducing recent and contemporary
trends in Western literature: the first two volumes alone included introduc-
tory notes on poets such as Jules Romains, Paul Verlaine, Max Jacob, Jean
Cocteau, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Eluard as well as essays
on futurism and surrealism. The journal also became an experimental ground
for the application of newly introduced poetic theories and techniques: poetic
formalism, cine-poems, constructivist prose poetry, and surrealism.
The closing of Poetry and Poetics coincides with the turning point in the
history of modern Japanese poetry. The Manchurian Incident (1931) brought
about a fundamental change in Japan’s sociocultural climate, affecting
not only the formalists but also the proletarian poets, who had actively
opposed the “l’esprit nouveau” poets through the publication of Senki
(Battle Flag), the official journal of NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta
Federacio/All Japan Proletarian Artists’ Association), between 1928 and
1931. The new literary movement, which responded to the post-1931 climate
and which proceeded to push the formalists and proletarians to the margins,
came to be known as the “cultural renaissance.” This movement sought to
reassess and restore the cultural tradition that had largely been left unexa-
mined by both the proletarians and the internationally inclined modernists of
the 1920s. Three major poetic journals appeared: Kogito (Cogito), Shiki (Four
Seasons), and Nihon romanha (The Japan Romantic School), the first issues of
which came out in 1932, 1933, and 1935 respectively. Later, despite conditions

715
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that made it increasingly difficult to publish, Cogito and Four Seasons contin-
ued to appear regularly as late as 1944. Strongly influenced by the ideologue
of the Japan Romantic School, Yasuda Yojurō (1910–81), these poets sought to
respond to renewed visions of Japanese modernity, struggling and negotiat-
ing with the dramatically changing political climate. With the consolidation
of the wartime regime, much of their activity eventually became mingled
with wartime discourse and lost its critical power.
Of the poets active during this time, Itō Shizuo (1906–53) was regarded as
Cogito’s key poet, while Miyoshi Tatsuji (1900–64) occupied a central position
in the Four Seasons group. Many of Itō’s early lyrics embrace tension and
refraction, as the semantic function of the language is challenged by the
poetic structure. In addition, the recurrent theme of an impossible return to
the past strongly echoes the idea of “irony” as it was advocated by the Japan
Romantic School. In contrast, Miyoshi’s verses are lyrical in the classic sense,
composed of lines that lead to evocative but stable imagery, supported by a
free, rhythmic beat:

Soaking wet in the rain, they stay quietly clustered in the same place.
It would not be surprising if a hundred years elapsed by in this single
instant.
The rain is falling. The rain is falling.
Bleak and dreary rain is falling.
... (“Ō-Aso,” The Great Aso Mountain, in Kusasenri, 1939)

Four Seasons attracted a number of lyrical poets, including Tachihara

Michizō (1914–39) and Nakahara Chūya (1907–37), whose melodious integra-
tion of traditional sensitivity to nature with unique sentiments of the modern
individual have been influential in the later lyrical tradition of modern
Japanese poetry.
Although the “cultural renaissance” was certainly the dominant discourse
of the militarist period, there were nevertheless traces of resistance and
rebellion from a number of poets. Two notable figures were Kaneko
Mitsuharu (1895–1975), who spent much of his time in the port cities in the
Southern Pacific, en route to Europe, and Oguma Hideo (1901–40), one of
the last of the proletarian poets whose voices quickly disappeared from the
literary scene of the 1930s. The latter is represented by the following lines:

If they cut off my hands, I will write with my feet,

If they cut off my feet, I will write with my mouth,
If they gag my mouth,

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Let me sing with the hole in my ass.

(“Genjitsu no toishi,” Whetstone of Reality, in Oguma Hideo Shishū,
Collected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1935)

The Japanese poetic scene of the immediate postwar period can be summed
up as a series of attempts to start a new page. In the wake of Japan’s defeat, the
poets were adamant in their desire to leave behind the modernist past and to
embark on the production of gendaishi (contemporary poetry) as opposed to
kindaishi (modern poetry). The most influential of the postwar movements
was led by the Arechi (Waste Land) group, which published a poetic journal,
The Waste Land, between 1947 and 1948. This was followed by the publication
of an annual poetic anthology Arechi shishū (The Waste Land Poetic
Collection), between 1951 and 1958. Its leader, Ayukawa Nobuo (1920–86),
argued that poets should radically question what they were writing for, and
that the reason for writing poetry lay not in the value of its aesthetics but in the
reality of everyday life. The recovery of “meaning” in poetry was the central
concern in the immediate postwar period, a stance that was also shared by the
poets of Rettō (Archipelago, 1952–5), who took a clearly leftist position. The
poets who played the central role in these groups, Ayukawa and Tamura
Ryūichi (1923–98) of Waste Land and Sekine Hiroshi (1924–94) and Hasegawa
Ryūsei (b. 1928) of Archipelago, among others, were all in their twenties at the
time, which reinforced a sense of a generational break from prewar poetic
activity.
A strong concern with the relationship between poetry and historical
consciousness was the salient engine for poetic activity during the first couple
of decades after 1945. A gradual change took place in the 1960s, however,
leading to the widely quoted proclamation of “the rhetorical present”
(shūjiteki genzai) by the poet and influential critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–
2012) in his Sengo shishi-ron (On Postwar Poetic History, 1978). Yoshimoto’s
terminology, which suggests the dominance of rhetoric over experience in
the contemporary approach to poetry, gave rise to numerous debates con-
cerning the interpretation of his thesis. The gradual transformation of “post-
war” sensibility, particularly with the emergence of a generation for whom
war experience did not constitute an immanent question of poetics, opened
up a space for poets to grapple with language from diverse angles.
In the earlier history of modern Japanese free verse poetry, women poets
were indisputably a minority. It is in the post-1945 period that we find an
efflorescence of female voices, with Tomioka Taeko (b. 1935) in the fifties,
Shiraishi Kazuko (b. 1931) in the sixties, together with many others, boldly

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shaking off the shackles of being a “woman,” desiring to verbalize all that had
been repressed in the male-dominated tradition of modern Japanese poetry. It
was high time, then, for the appearance on the scene of a poet like Itō Hiromi
(b. 1955), who has, since her debut in the 1980s, consistently challenged the
genderization of “woman,” radically weaving words out of her physiological
self and exploring new territories of the body, voice, and poetry.

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 75
Trends in postwar literature, 1945–1970s
k e n s u k e k ō n o a n d a n n s h e r i f

During the Japanese empire’s long wars with China and the Allies in the 1930s
and 40s, people on the home front relied on the officially controlled print
media and radio for news. On August 15, 1945, the radio delivered the
emperor’s broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender. Only two days later,
readers found in the Asahi newspaper a poem composed by a leading poet,
Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), called “Ichioku gōkyū” (The Lamentations of
One Hundred Million) about this astounding turn of events. Takamura, who
had distinguished himself as a leading free verse poet and as a sculptor who
had trained in Paris, wrote several volumes of poetry after Pearl Harbor in
support of Japan’s imperialist expansion, employing the propagandistic rheto-
ric of the day. “The Lamentations of One Hundred Million” not only
registered the shock of the nation’s defeat in a long, harrowing war, but
expressed a sense of incredulity at hearing the human voice of an emperor
who had been considered divine. Takamura represents the perspective of still
deferential imperial subjects, ashamed that the nation had pushed its sover-
eign to such an extreme – a viewpoint that would soon be complicated by
issues of war responsibility.
In the drive toward Total War, the state maintained strict control over
media and speech for more than a decade. Many individuals subscribed to the
government’s rhetoric and worked actively toward the realization of the
“Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Whether enthusiastically or out
of fear, the majority of writers cooperated with the war effort and empire
building. Novelists and poets who dared to oppose the government’s agenda
either ended up in jail or retreated into silence. After the war, the Allied
Occupation forces dismantled the empire and discredited the ideology and
rhetoric that had supported it. The Tokyo War Crimes Trials did not,
however, target writers. Takamura Kōtarō, one of the very few writers to
be confronted about complicity with Japan’s militarism, withdrew from the
literary world and spent seven years in self-imposed exile in northern Japan.

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He also gave expression to his guilt in the poetry sequence “Angu shōden”
(Autobiographical Sketch of Imbecility): “I have seen a sickening amount of
my own imbecility . . . I’ll be glad to submit to the extreme penalty.”
In October 1945, the Allied Occupation authorities ordered the release of
some five hundred political prisoners. The General Headquarters (GHQ) of
the Occupation also declared the 1925 Peace Preservation Law null and void,
thus removing one of the former regime’s main legal mechanisms for
domestic repression. Among the freed political prisoners were members of
the Japan Communist Party (JCP) and other fervent Marxists. The JCP
leaders immediately went to work rebuilding the Party. Many leftist writers
believed that the new society envisioned by the American occupiers would
be the foundation for a democratic revolution.
In 1946, following the revival of the JCP, literary writers led by Miyamoto
Yuriko (1899–1951) and Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79) founded the journal Shin
Nihon bungaku (New Japanese Literature). All the charter members of the
New Japan Literature Association (Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai) had been part of
the proletarian literary movement before the war, but a few honorary
members such as Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), and
Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968), while having few links with Marxism and leftism,
also joined the group out of the fervent belief in a fresh start for Japanese
literature. However, the group soon became embroiled in philosophical and
ideological debates with other progressive literary groups such as the Kindai
Bungaku (Modern Literature) group and, for a certain period, was heavily
swayed by the political aims of the JCP. By the sixties, the Shin Nihon
Bungaku Kai had broken with the Communist Party and focused on produ-
cing its influential, high-quality literary journal (Shin Nihon bungaku), which
launched the careers of many important writers and critics.
The literary critic Etō Jun (1932–99) later regarded Japanese literature
under Occupation censorship as existing in a “closed linguistic space” because
certain topics – from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to anti-American sentiments –
were banned. When GHQ sought to excise art forms that extolled “feudal
values,” they brought certain samurai films and kabuki theater under close
scrutiny. At the same time, writers and filmmakers had to search for new
modes of representation because much of the language that had become
standard in descriptions of wartime experience, of heroism, and of Japan’s
military was now taboo. Progressive writers who had initially seen the
Occupation as the first step toward a democratic revolution and a new
opportunity for socialism were also faced with the increasingly anti-
Communist Cold War agenda of the United States. Although far less brutal

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than the pre-1945 censorship system, the Civil Information and Education
Section (CIE) and other parts of the Occupation extensively censored
Japanese literature and print media. The dismantling of the CIE and the
Press Code in the last years of the Occupation signaled the advent of a
political system that, for the first time in centuries, did not have an extensive
and formal censorship apparatus.
The Occupation did not place as strict controls on the flow of information
as had the earlier imperial state – after all, the new postwar constitution
guaranteed freedom of speech, thought, the press, and assembly. As the
publishing industry witnessed a surge in activity, publishers vied to acquire
precious imported paper or even black market paper. Readers were so
hungry for new books that lines formed in front of bookstores the night
before the Iwanami Publishing Company’s release of The Collected Works of
the philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Prosperity, however, proved
fleeting. Many of the small publishers that sprung up in the late forties fell
victim to oversupply, fluctuations in the distribution system, labor struggles,
and management problems.
Noteworthy during the first years after the war was the flood of kasutori or
pulp magazines on the market. Linked with the sexually titillating entertain-
ment culture that had sprung up in Tokyo and other cities, the cheaply
produced kasutori magazines alarmed the Japanese police sufficiently that
some titles were confiscated under Article 175 of the Criminal Code (in force
since the Meiji period). In January 1947, the police targeted Ryōki (Bizarre)
because it contained a short story portraying a military wife who has an
adulterous affair. However, social values and the law changed rapidly during
the Occupation: by October of the same year the laws against adultery, along
with those banning acts of lèse-majesté, had been eliminated.
In 1945 ten thousand readers eagerly snatched up the first issue of the
kasutori cultural magazine Riberaru (Liberal) to read not only a translation of
a Maupassant short story but also essays such as “On Sexual Desire” by the
respected author Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) or “On Chastity” by
Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948). Remarkably, the same issue featured pan pan
(prostitutes who serviced the Occupation GIs) and a risqué dialogue between
husband and wife as an “English Conversation Skit.” A wide variety of
kasutori magazines sprung up, serving briefly as a venue for literature.
Romansu (Romance, 1946), with fiction by the influential Kikuchi Kan and
the buraiha (“Decadent”) writer Oda Sakunosuke (1913–47), sold 300,000
copies in six months. Pictures of voluptuous women on the cover and inside
the magazines promoted sales too. The sensational sexological magazine Aka

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to kuro (Red and Black, 1946), edited by sexologist Takahashi Tetsu, featured
nude photographs and articles on “Carnal Art.” Decameron, Sex Culture, Jeep,
Okay!, Venus, Cabaret, and Odd Tales Graph were among the many erotic titles
published in 1947.
From established authors such as Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), Hayashi Fumiko
(1903–51), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), Sakaguchi
Ango (1906–55), and Oda Sakunosuke, to newer generations of novelists like
Noma Hiroshi (1915–91) and Takeda Taijun (1912–76), novelists of all stripes
were writing about sex. The kasutori culture may suggest a general fascination
with the carnal scene in entertainment areas of the city, but these writers had
more fundamental concerns in mind. They sought to represent people who, in
reconstructing a body crushed by wartime experiences, attempted to repossess
and reconceive of physicality and sexuality as part of their new daily life.
As literary writers explored the means and meanings of liberating desire,
the postwar media simultaneously pursued the commodification of sex. This
included the scientific mode, as exemplified by the popularization of works
such as Dutch gynecologist Th. H. Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its
Physiology and Technique. Translated into Japanese as Kanzen naru fūfu (The
Complete Couple), the book offered detailed information about sexual
techniques and a frank examination of the centrality of sex to the health of
marital relations. The rise of Van de Velde’s manual to bestseller status in the
late 1940s suggests that audiences existed both for such imported scientific
views of sexuality, and for the titillating and often transgressive sexuality
portrayed in the pulps.
The authorities periodically sought to control representations of sexuality
in highly publicized proceedings such as the Japanese translation of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover case. During the 1950s, both the translator Itō Sei (1905–69)
and the publisher Oyama Shoten were found guilty of violating obscenity
laws. Such exercise of authority was seen again in the legal prosecution of
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s (1928–87) Akutoku no sakae (1960s), a translation and
adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette ou les prospérités du
vice, and of Nosaka Akiyuki’s (1930–) challenge to the censors when he
republished Nagai Kafū’s “pornographic” short story “Yojōhan fusuma no
shitabari” (Behind the Papering of the Four-and-a-Half-Mat Room) in the
1970s, among others.
Not surprisingly, the masculine quest for a new identity and a new voice in
the postwar world became a central concern, both in literary works and in
authors’ lives, which were fascinating to the media and to readers. Literary
celebrities such as Nagai Kafū, Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962), and Shiga

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Naoya wrote in their familiar idiom about the ravaged cities, but their
techniques seemed somehow inadequate in representing the disruption and
destruction that readers encountered. If anything, the task of finding an idiom
suitable to the early postwar age fell to novelists who had been dedicated to
modernism and the avant-garde during the relatively open 1920s, or even to
those who had been implicated in the ideology and complicity of the 1930s.
One such writer who began republishing soon after the war was Dazai
Osamu (1909–48), who saw into print a number of works that he had penned
during wartime but had held back in fear of censorship. In the first of these
publications, Otogizōshi (Fairy Tales, October 1945), Dazai parodied folk
stories such as “Momotarō” (Peach Boy), which had been employed to
promote values of the imperial system and the war effort. Dazai’s last two
novels, Shayō (The Setting Sun, 1947) and Ningen shikkaku (No Longer
Human, literally “Failed Human,” 1948), struck a chord with readers and
critics. In The Setting Sun, Dazai portrays an upper-class family who in the
postwar period faces the demise of their way of life in both material and
ethical terms. No Longer Human is heavily autobiographical, especially in its
depiction of the many “failures” of the protagonist Yōzō, in the failed love
affairs, the short flirtations with politics, and the multiple attempts at suicide.
However, Dazai resists the confessional style, and instead weaves a compel-
ling tale of a tragically flawed man. Readers burdened by the wounds of a
long, painful war identified with the protagonist who, like themselves, felt
that he had failed in many ways but who also recognized the formidable
challenges posed by external social forces.
With its provocation and shock value, Sakaguchi Ango’s (1906–55) essay on
the aesthetics of early postwar ruins, “Daraku ron” (On Decadence, 1946),
struck many readers as utterly original in its take on identity in this transi-
tional age. Having witnessed flames engulfing Tokyo, Ango provocatively
proposed that fear is not the sole significance of such a sight: he perceived
“the beauty of those people obedient to destiny, the beauty of love in the
midst of that appalling destruction.” Yet he asserts that this beauty is false, a
delusion, and that those same people who showed obedience to the state’s
demand for sacrifice and self-denial must, in the postwar ruins, do the most
human thing: be “decadent.” His championing of decadence depends not
only on the context of a society in an extreme state of flux, but also on an
understanding, shared by many of his readers, that the “healthy” morality
that had been promoted by imperial Japan had been utterly discredited by
Japan’s defeat and the values of the Occupation. In short, Ango identified
material chaos and moral devastation as an opportunity for Japan to rethink

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what it means to be alive: “We must, by degeneration from ‘healthy mor-

ality,’ once more become real human beings.”
The cohort of writers who had experienced the extreme political repres-
sion of the 1930s and the militarization of the late thirties and forties was
known as the First Generation of Postwar Writers (Dai-ichiji sengo ha). The
innovations of this generation were not solely thematic or philosophical.
Noma Hiroshi attempted to forge a new literary language, a style appropriate
to the nihilistic worldview of those who knew the profound violence of war
and the soul-searching over complicity in the aftermath. His consciously
complex sentence structures have been described as “sticky” and “thick,”
capable of evoking a visceral reaction in readers. So provocative was his
writing technique in Shinkū chitai (Zone of Emptiness, 1952), his acclaimed
novel about life in the Japanese military, that “his contemporaries felt they
had encountered a style of writing that could replicate the assault on reason, a
descriptive technique that recreated the sense of a humanity pushed to the
breaking point.”1 Noma joined many fellow writers in exploring political and
philosophical issues, including essays on Marxism in the post-Stalinist world
that he published after disillusioning revelations about the horrific abuses of
Stalinist totalitarianism in the mid 1950s. Some of these male writers were
ultimately broken by the extended political and cultural crises of the 1930s and
1940s. Both Oda Sakunosuke and Sakaguchi Ango struggled with drug
addiction, and Dazai Osamu’s suicide in 1948 is emblematic of the despair
of this age.
From early Meiji until 1945, writers, editors, and publishers worked under a
government censorship apparatus that monitored expressions of resistance to
state and imperial aims, and enforced certain notions of morality. The Home
Ministry was overt in its approach, which meant that publishers had to keep
in mind the government’s practice of banning sales of already published
books (hatsubai kinshi), which could result in huge losses for the publisher.
Readers could see the censorship marks (fuseji, X, and other marks substituted
for printed characters) in their books and magazines and notice that pages
were missing.
SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers), in contrast, set up the
Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD, 1945–9), which was in charge of mon-
itoring all materials published in Japan for violations of the Press Code (which
included a ban on “false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers”). SCAP,
however, insisted that CCD’s activities not be made obvious to the general

1
Douglas Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 93.

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public. Publishers and the press were of course aware of the censorship
because they were required to submit materials to CCD before publication.
The case of Yoshida Mitsuru’s (1923–79) Senkan Yamato no saigo (Requiem for
Battleship Yamato, 1946) illustrates the interaction between censor and
author. The Yamato was the imperial Navy’s last hope, even as the air war
dominated the late stages of World War II. As the enormous battleship
headed toward Okinawa in April 1945, it was sunk in a fierce Allied attack,
with the loss of more than two thousand crew members. Yoshida, a junior
naval officer, survived to write a stirring first-person account of the ship’s
final mission and of the men on board. CCD, however, would not permit
publication of Yoshida’s memoir because they deemed it evocative of
“Japanese militaristic spirit.”
As part of its Total War agenda, the imperial government enforced
positive literary depictions of the battlefield and stories that would exalt the
soldiers’ heroic sacrifice. After the defeat, literary writers took on a significant
role in redefining the cultural and political meanings of the massive, costly,
and now discredited military venture. Yoshida’s Battleship Yamato does not
glorify war as heroic or beautiful, yet it approaches the massive losses with
solemnity, offering a stark contrast to the irreverent celebration of decadence
espoused by Sakaguchi Ango.
In contrast, Ōoka Shōhei’s (1909–88) autobiographically inspired novel
Furyoki (Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story) reveals the author’s con-
viction that death on the battlefield is “a pure and simple waste” and that luck
is the only guarantee of survival. Ōoka, a veteran and former prisoner of war,
completed the first draft in early 1946, only months after the war’s end. Out of
concern that the work might be censored, Ōoka’s publisher delayed publica-
tion until February 1948, when the first of nine sections appeared in print. The
first-person narrator of Taken Captive is a Japanese soldier fighting in the
Philippines during World War II. Weakened by malaria, the narrator has
been left behind by his unit. He tries to flee from the approaching Allied
troops but collapses in the jungle. His military training included the lesson
that a soldier should take his own life rather than be taken prisoner of war, so
he decides to do just that. But he pauses to wonder what to do should an
enemy soldier come across him first. A key passage in the novel describes
precisely that encounter: a young American walks toward him, and stops
only feet away. The hidden narrator raises his rifle but does not shoot.
For the epigraph of the section, Ōoka chose a phrase from the medieval
(thirteenth-century) Buddhist treatise Tan’nishō: “It is not from goodness of
heart that you do not kill.” The narrator had thought deeply about the ethical

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dimensions of killing another soldier, but in the end it was not moral
questioning or his spirit that resulted in not pulling the trigger. Rather
through some trick of fate the soldier survived, against all odds, malaria,
the battlefield, and captivity as a prisoner of war, and was able to return to
Japan after the war. He also remains acutely aware that, lacking such divine
intervention and despite his “goodness of heart,” there was a distinct possi-
bility that he might have killed the GI. Taken Captive explores the complex
feelings of shame at being in POW camp accompanied by relief that he and
his comrades are out of harm’s way. The novel brings to life the various
personalities of the Japanese in the camp, and the psychologies of men who
have been freed from the rules and customs of the imperial military but who,
as soldiers of a defeated nation, subsequently have to reconceive of their
individual and group identities under the authority of the victors.
The Occupation authorities kept especially close watch over writings
about the A-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among the best-
known atomic bomb writers, Nagai Takashi (1908–51) completed a manu-
script about his experiences as a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) and as a
physician treating other hibakusha in Nagasaki less than a year after the
bombing in January 1946. However, because of the Occupation Authority
censors, who determined that publication should not be allowed so soon
after the war, Nagai’s compelling memoir Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of
Nagasaki) did not appear in print until three years later, when it immediately
drew huge attention from the reading public. The doctor’s medical and
scientific insights into radiation disease that afflicted many hibakusha, his
invocation of Nagasaki’s Christian past and his own faith, and the compelling
writing style contributed to the book’s huge success. In 1949, the year when
the USA lost its monopoly over atomic bombs, the Occupation encouraged a
shift away from silence about the bomb to a new discourse that both
represented people in all countries as potential victims and divorced the
USA from the ethically controversial act of using the weapons.
Hiroshima writers such as Hara Tamiki (1905–51) and Ōta Yōko (1906–63)
were similarly conscious of the Occupation censors when writing about the
August 1945 bombings and their aftermath. Ōta started writing her powerful
novel Shikabane no machi (City of Corpses) within weeks of the bombing,
even as she suffered from symptoms of life-threatening radiation disease. The
censors ordered her to delete sections of her manuscript, and the expurgated
version was finally published in 1948. City of Corpses did not appear in
complete form until 1950, when Occupation censorship had been phased
out. Similarly, the publication history of Hara Tamiki’s critically acclaimed

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Natsu no hana (Summer Flowers), completed within six months of the end of
the war, features a search for a venue and title that would evade the eyes of
the censors and a long wait before a mainstream publisher issued a single-
volume version in 1949.
Hara describes the experience of the August 6 atomic bombing in his
autobiographically inspired Summer Flowers. As he struggles through the ruins
of the city, encountering the dead and dying at every step, the first-person
narrator struggles to grasp this unprecedented event, articulating his experi-
ences in terms of familiar genres: “I had surely seen spectacles like this at the
movies,” he comments, and later likens the scenes to Poe’s “The Fall of the
House of Usher.” Passing by a streetcar flipped over on its side, a horse dead
on the ground, the narrator compares what he has seen to “the world of
surrealist paintings.”
The Japanese government dedicated the nation to economic recovery and
prosperity under the American nuclear umbrella; a new national identity as
victim of nuclear war helped to bury ethical questions about the Japanese
empire’s imperialism and militarism in Asia. The government played its part
in fashioning discourses of peace and “No more Hiroshima” as part of
postwar nationalism and memory, even as it promoted its alliance with the
nuclear-armed Cold War superpower United States. From the 1950s, the
Japanese government encouraged the rebranding of the anniversaries of
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on August 6 and 9 and the surrender
on August 15 as public rituals of mourning and healing.
Arguably the best-known work of atomic bomb literature among general
reading audiences is Ibuse Masuji’s (1898–1993) novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain,
1965). The novel’s narrative frame introduces readers to Hiroshima in 1950.
We come to know the struggles of hibakusha who are still plagued by
radiation disease, the shadow of death, and social discrimination five long
years after the atomic bombing. A couple with no children, Shigematsu and
Shigeko have taken in their niece Yasuko and are seeking a suitable marriage
for her. Every prospect, however, comes to nothing. Shigematsu suspects
that suitors are cautious because he and Shigeko are hibakusha. When he
hears of rumors that Yasuko might also have been in Hiroshima on August 6,
Shigematsu is determined to squash them by sharing her diary with the
matchmaker. He sets about copying his niece’s diary by hand, and then,
wanting to muster more evidence, copies his own diary and even his wife’s.
Yet his efforts to enlist the authority of texts to help his niece come to naught
when Yasuko, who was exposed to the black rain that fell after the bombing,
starts to show symptoms of radiation sickness. Years after its end, the war’s

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dark and destructive shadow abruptly intrudes, provoking fear and anxiety in
the midst of a peaceful and stable daily life. Black Rain raises the question of
whether peacetime will forever be haunted by this new variety of war and
weapons. Significantly, more than half of Ibuse’s novel consists of direct
quotes from diaries of actual hibakusha. A single telling of the story of August
6 is not sufficient; instead, the author makes a monumental effort to com-
municate the experiences of the bombing by transcribing numerous narra-
tives from actual survivors.
Although the atomic bombings were only one variety of wartime experi-
ence for Japanese people, many literary writers, whether hibakusha or not,
have focused on the trauma and aftermath. Notable works are Hayashi
Kyōko’s (b. 1930) short story “Matsuri no ba” (Ritual of Death, 1975) and
Takenishi Hiroko’s (b. 1929) “Gishiki” (The Rite, 1978), which depict the
experiences of female hibakusha. Other authors chose the historical novel as
the genre most appropriate to depicting the bombings, such as Inoue
Mitsuharu’s (1926–92) Chi no mure (People of the Land, 1963), Fukunaga
Takehiko’s (1918–79) Shi no shima (The Island of Death, 1971), and Oda
Makoto’s (1932–2007) HIROSHIMA (Hiroshima, 1981).
Another significant theme of liberating the emperor himself from the imper-
ial institution is explored in Marxist writer and poet Nakano Shigeharu’s (1902–
79) compelling postwar story “Goshaku no sake” (Five Cups of Sake, 1946). The
story takes the form of a letter written by an aging school teacher to his student
who is a member of the Communist Party. Slightly tipsy, the teacher rambles
on about the shift from totalitarianism to democracy. He is tortured by regrets,
recalling the past when he passively saw off students and family to the front.
Now he can only watch as his student becomes caught up in the Communist
Party and read the press coverage of the new democracy. He writes about a
ceremony for the promulgation of the new postwar constitution, when he
realized how much the attitude and posture of the assembled resembles those
during wartime mobilization for the imperial cause. No one – not the emperor,
not the Japanese people – has been liberated, he concludes.
Although the Occupation authorities did not put an outright ban on writing
about the emperor, a tacit proscription was quickly put in place. One writer
who violated that taboo was Fukazawa Shichirō (1914–87), who is best known
for the gritty Narayama bushikō (The Ballad of Narayama, 1956), a prize-winning
novella inspired by folk tales about the practice of abandoning old people in the
remote mountains. In 1960, he published the playful, darkly comic story “Fūryū
mutan” (The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance), which depicts a man who
dreams that he witnesses a rebellious group with “leftist passions” occupying

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the imperial palace grounds. Even as a carnivalesque atmosphere fills the

grounds with fireworks and folk dancing, the crown prince and princess are
decapitated. Fukazawa’s story attracted praise but more notably harsh criticism
– publicly from the Imperial Household Agency and informally from many
sides – until finally Fukazawa went into hiding and his publisher Chūō
Kōronsha made public apologies. A young right-wing fanatic stormed the
home of the publisher’s president, injuring the president’s wife and murdering
his housekeeper. After this outburst of violent acts, Fukazawa himself retreated
from such topics, and other writers and publishers grew increasingly reluctant
to treat in fiction the figure of the emperor.
The bundan, or literary establishment, evolved as writers, critics, and the
media defined the parameters of canonical modern literary production dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century. In the early years after the war,
many of the prominent bundan writers and publishers retreated from public
view, but by 1949 the bundan started to enjoy a revival, although in a very
different form. After 1945, the number of small publishers increased drama-
tically, joining the already dominant major houses Chūō Kōronsha and
Shinchōsha, to become active producers in the literary field. Chikuma
Shobō, Kawade Shobō, Kadokawa Shoten, Iwanami Shoten, Kōdansha, and
Shūeisha are among the presses that benefited from the postwar boom in
publishing, and contributed to the expansion of literary publishing and read-
erships by issuing journals that focused on or featured fiction and poetry.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, a remarkable number of literary
journals including Shinchō, Bungakukai, Gunzō, Bungei, Umi, and Subaru
lined bookstore shelves. Each issue was voluminous (nearly three hundred
pages) and was published every month, all in Tokyo. The journals stimulated
further attention by establishing literary prizes. Long-standing and influential
prizes such as the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize were revived in 1949.
The shinjinshō, or prizes for new writers, gave publishers a central role in
spotlighting the younger generation and shaping the careers of new writers.
These same years witnessed a boom in the publication of zenshū or multi-
volume collected works of modern Japanese literature. Most major publish-
ers issued their own variation of such zenshū. In this way publishers played a
decisive role in defining the modern literary canon. The long-lasting com-
mercial viability of handsomely produced, heavily annotated, and often pricy
sets of hardcover books confirmed the prestige of literature as a cultural form,
from the Occupation period through the 1980s.
This reverence accorded to literature, however, started to diminish during
the 1980s. The power of multimedia such as television, cinema, anime,

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manga, and later digital media created new audience expectations and desires
for other modes of representation. Generations of young people favored a
variety of cultural modes, and not only textually based ones. The hierarchy of
cultural authority that placed literature at the top became a thing of the past.
But while audiences for literature dwindled, literature did not die. This shift
did, however, have real economic repercussions for publishers. To maintain
their literature lists and to compensate for losses involved in producing a
literary journal, publishers had to reap profits from selling manga.
The 1950s, the period when the postwar bundan came into being, spanned
the end of the Allied Occupation and the start of new wars on the Korean
peninsula and in Indochina (Vietnam). Domestically, the fifties was a decade
of political and cultural divisions and debate. Article 9 of the new postwar
Constitution banned Japan from maintaining a military, yet the Diet estab-
lished the so-called Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in 1954. The end of the Allied
Occupation resulted in Japan’s sovereignty in 1952, but the Cold War alliance
between the two countries resulted in the USA wielding a considerable level
of indirect control over Japan, including the maintenance of American
military bases on Japanese soil. Moves toward remilitarization by a conser-
vative Japanese hegemony and the continued intrusive hand of its “Free
World” ally (the United States) in Japanese society were both factors in
stimulating leftist movements that supported the Soviet Union and revolu-
tionary China.
In 1952 Noma Hiroshi completed his full-length novel Shinkū chitai (Zone
of Emptiness), which portrays the regimentation of the imperial Japanese
Army soldiers in the “homeland” before they were shipped to the front, and
the corruption of the military command. Noma exposes the insidious vio-
lence that was exercised as a routine part of military education and training,
and the degradation and terror of all involved in that system. Although
classified as a work of leftist literature, the novel won a wide reading
audience, as well as critical acclaim, and resonated especially with the antiwar
and antimilitarist sentiments of the postwar bundan. A film version appeared
in the early 1950s.
The main character in Zone of Emptiness is Kitani, a private from the poorest
stratum of society. He is falsely accused by his superiors of stealing a wallet,
and is put in jail. Kitani’s humiliation and abjection as a soldier and as a man is
a central theme. Noma portrays with nuance the humiliation and brutality
directed at new soldiers, particularly well-educated ones, by uneducated
veteran soldiers. Noma also portrays the psychology of Soda, a well-educated
soldier who, filled with self-hatred and anger as he watches the impotence of

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the abused intellectual soldiers, fantasizes that the complacent Kitani can
destroy the military. Some contemporary critics complained about the social
dynamics and values implied by the character of Soda, who seems to be a
proxy for Noma himself.
In the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–3), which initiated Japan’s eco-
nomic recovery and rapid economic growth, the focus of literature started to
move away from wartime, with writers turning to stories about contemporary
families, the home, and daily life. The debuts of Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013),
Shōno Junzō (1921–2009), and Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (1924–94) in the mid fifties
accelerated the popularity of family-oriented novels. Among these, Yasuoka
Shōtarō’s novel Kaihen no kōkei (A View by the Sea, 1959) presents a moving
portrait of a broken family. The family in question consists of a father who had
been a military veterinarian and a commissioned officer during the war, his
wife, and their son Shintarō, who also served in the military. Late in the war,
Shintarō contracted tuberculosis and was discharged from the army. He and
his mother lived together peacefully until the defeat, at which point the father
came home a changed man, his military identity and his patriarchal authority
erased by Occupation reforms. Shintarō never thought of himself as someone
who could step into his father’s shoes – he had been a low-ranking, sickly
soldier, and in peacetime he remains stuck in a similar place, uninspired and
lacking in ambition. In the midst of this new order, his mother starts showing
signs of dementia.
The novel begins with Shintarō receiving notice from the mental hospital
that his mother does not have long to live; he and his father make the journey
to see her. The narrative describes the time they spend with her during her
final days, as Shintarō comes to the realization that it was his mother who
held the family together during the long war. Through flashbacks, he
ponders the flaws in his father, whose identity relied so heavily on regressive
models of authority and masculinity. The mother fades rapidly, while the
son, a man suggestive of his times, has not only suffered the symbolic loss of
the authoritative paternal figure, but also witnessed the breakdown of the
mother figure.
Critics during the 1950s and 1960s considered Yasuoka as part of the same
line of “Third Generation of New Writers” as Shimao Toshio (1917–86) and
Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006) because they were skilled writers who explored
themes of individuals and family still living with – and trying to grow beyond –
the dark legacy of war. All of these authors went to war. Shimao had the
remarkable experience of being a tokkōtai or kamikaze pilot. On a small island
in the Pacific, he and his squad made preparations for takeoff and resigned

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themselves to a certain death, only to receive the news of the war’s end.
Shimao was inspired to write many fictional works based on these experi-
ences, such as “Shuppatsu wa tsui ni otozurezu” (The Departure Finally
Never Came, 1962). Shimao also produced many stories and novels inspired
by his family life after the war and especially his wife’s mental illness, the most
famous of which is the novel Shi no toge (The Sting of Death, 1960).
The first chapter of The Sting of Death portrays a married couple in crisis, as
Miho discovers her husband Toshio’s infidelity. The two had met and fallen
passionately in love late in the war, when Toshio’s squad was posted on an
island in the South Pacific, and married soon after the war. The work, which
is regarded as autobiographically inspired literary prose fiction, portrays,
among other things, Shimao’s fall from his identity as a military hero (a
suicide pilot), and his transformation into an ordinary father whose days
should be occupied with work and family life but who is frequently absent.
His unfaithfulness sparks madness in his wife, and she relentlessly forces him
to recount his extramarital relationships. Toshio breaks down and apolo-
gizes, time and time again. In turn, Miho has moments of clarity and asks for
her husband’s forgiveness. In real life, Shimao’s wife recovered and the two
reconciled, but the novel ends less certainly. Shimao continued, for more
than fifteen years, to write Sting of Death in different formats including novella
and short story, until he published it in its final form in 1977.
Kojima Nobuo’s acclaimed novel Hōyō kazoku (Embracing Family, 1965)
also portrays marital infidelity, but this time it is the wife who is having the
affair. The Miwa family enjoys a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, thanks to
the booming economy, and can even afford to have a maid. Miwa Shunsuke
is an academic and translator who lectures about life in America, where he
lived for a year. His wife Tokiko is less than satisfied with his old-fashioned
attitudes and fecklessness, and decides to have a fling with an American GI.
She flaunts her romance to her husband, saying that he should just grin and
bear it. “Look at it objectively. Think of it as a comedy. You’re a literature
specialist, after all!” Tokiko mocks him. And Shunsuke does not argue back.
Again, we see the collapse of the traditional role of the patriarch. It is easy to
read this novel as an allegory for US–Japanese relations at the time, but
Kojima’s work has much greater psychological depth. Indeed, the plot takes a
surprising turn: Tokiko is stricken with breast cancer, and does not recover. It
is this trauma that forces Tokiko and Shunsuke out of their bitterness and self-
absorption.
While critics labeled Kojima and Yasuoka as the “Third Wave New
Writers,” the debut of writers such as Ishihara Shintarō (b. 1932), Kaikō Ken

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(1930–89), and Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) marked the rise of a generation of
novelists who had been too young to fight during the war. These young
writers conceived of literature and its relationship to the media in new ways,
and had different political and cultural reference points. It was in the mid
fifties that the mass media started to feature the awarding of literary prizes
such as the Akutagawa Prize and the Naoki Prize as part of popular culture.
The iconic figure in this massive shift toward middle-brow culture and the
diversification of media is the indomitable Ishihara Shintarō. Although Ishihara
became a prominent and highly controversial neoconservative politician later
in life, he was a huge star of youth culture in the 1950s. His Taiyō no kisetsu
(Season of the Sun, 1956), a story of rebellious youth, rose to prominence not
only as entertainment, but also because of the controversy that it provoked
when Ishihara won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which had until then
been reserved for highbrow fiction. Season of the Sun was quickly made into a
movie, and was celebrated in the new popular weekly magazines (shūkanshi).
This in turn spawned new fashions such as the Shintarō-gari (Shintaro haircut)
that matched well with aloha shirts, and the Taiyōzoku or Sun Tribe: self-
absorbed middle- and upper-class adolescents who reject sexual abstinence and
rebel by driving cars fast and having fun in the sun. Shintarō had a role in
promoting the film and singing career of his younger brother Ishihara Yūjirō
(1934–87), who became the most hailed star of popular youth culture movies of
the fifties and sixties such as Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit, 1956).
Another literary writer who emerged at this time was Mishima Yukio
(1925–70), whose literary hits in this period ranged from Kinkakuji (The
Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956), depicting a Buddhist monk so
obsessed with a beautiful temple that he is driven to destroy it, to crowd
pleasers such as the earnest love story Shiosai (The Sound of Waves, 1954)
and Nagasugita haru (Spring So Long, 1956), a best-selling humorous tale of a
marital engagement that drags on for too long. Many of Mishima’s novels
were made into movies, but they had only a minor impact on Japanese
cinema. Mishima’s interest in the movies differed from that of Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), whose engagement with cinema in the 1910s and 20s
stemmed from his fascination with the potential of film as a medium. By
contrast, Mishima became involved in film mostly because of its commer-
cial potential and because he was an exhibitionist. The campy cult film
Kurotokage (Black Lizard, 1968, directed by Fukusaku Kinji), based on
Mishima’s stage adaptation of an Edogawa Rampo detective story, with
its transvestite star and a Mishima cameo, has arguably had longer appeal
than his other forays into the movies. If anything, theater stimulated

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Mishima’s imagination more than did film: he wrote a number of well-

regarded modern plays and innovative noh plays.
Mishima, who in 1970 gained international celebrity by staging his own
ritual suicide as a public spectacle, lived and wrote as flamboyantly as he died.
He flaunted his provocative political opinions about the emperor and the
Japanese Self Defense Forces, and even formed his own private army, dres-
sing his men in designer uniforms. For all the popular heterosexual love
stories, he also attracted audiences by writing frankly about homosexuality in
works such as Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949). Despite his
sometimes unconventional themes, his novels’ popular appeal can be
explained partly by his use of plot-heavy, character-driven narratives and
the employment of familiar genres.
Of this generation of writers, Ōe Kenzaburō stands out as the most
stylistically innovative and thematically bold. Like Ishihara and Mishima,
Ōe used fiction as a means of expressing his alienation from mainstream
Japanese society. He also portrayed many rebellious characters who want to
fight. Yet Ōe is creative and willing to imagine pathologies, dilemmas, time,
and space beyond the ordinary, and to experiment with the potential of
language. Ōe’s reputation as a writer was cemented when his “Shiiku” (The
Catch, also translated as Prize Catch, 1957) won the Akutagawa Prize. The
story evokes the imaginative worldview of children in an isolated rural village
during wartime and their encounter with an African-American GI whose
plane crashed nearby. A number of his early works also venture into sexual
obsession and perversion. His acclaimed novel Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal
Matter, 1964) was inspired by what for Ōe was in fact a very individual matter:
the birth of his son with brain damage. It was in this powerful work that he
succeeded in exploring the ways that personal struggles are entangled with
history and politics. Clearly one of the subtexts of many of Ōe’s works,
including Man’en gannen no futtobōru (translated as The Silent Cry, 1967), is the
anxiety of the nuclear age, as the Cold War nuclear arms race threatened
humankind with annihilation.
The frank and graphic use of violence and sex in Ōe’s novels has proven
controversial. In his earlier novels, the writer emphasized characters who
resorted to violence as a means of critiquing the gap that existed between
postwar ideals of democracy and actual practice. Like Mishima, Ōe portrays
homoeroticism frankly. While Mishima has been labeled “fascist,” and Ōe
progressive, they were among the few male writers of their generation to
treat same-sex relations in their writing either as a site of liberation or as part
of a marginalized or pathological identity. As he matured as a writer and

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person, Ōe grappled in his writing with the struggle of disabled people to find
a voice. The writer’s repeated return to his native Shikoku in his fiction aimed
at creating in narrative form an alternative kind of community, one capable
of resisting the modern pathologies of violence and the security state.
Japan’s membership in the “Free World” during the Cold War dictated
that it maintain a strong military alliance with the USA, and it also contrib-
uted to its choice to pursue rapid economic growth based on industrialization
and consumerism. A decade of citizen protests against the US–Japan military
alliance, culminating in 100,000 people surrounding the Diet Building and
uniting against ratification of the Security Treaty in 1960, is evidence that the
nation’s course was not chosen by unanimous agreement. Into the 1960s,
anti-establishment protests continued, splintering into diverse groups of
leftists, communists, and progressives, each seeking to voice their own
political vision in opposition to the conservative hegemony that ruled
Japan. The escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s had implications
for Japan, because the American military bases on Japanese soil were essential
to the US war effort, and Japanese industry profited from the war. In reaction,
citizens’ groups openly expressed their disagreement with the use of Japan as
a staging ground for this controversial and hugely costly military venture,
even as they enjoyed the fruits of consumer society.
In this atmosphere of sixties protest and challenging the status quo,
Ishimure Michiko (b. 1927) wrote Kugai jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow,
1969), her remarkable literary account of the staggering human and environ-
mental costs of industrial pollution. Ishimure’s work concerns the infamous
mercury poisoning of humans and other creatures in the Minamata area,
south of Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu. Chisso, a chemical and fertilizer
company, had been dumping mercury-laden effluent into a drainage canal
leading out into the bay at Minamata since the 1930s. Thousands of local
people who ate seafood from the bay became ill, and many died excruciating
deaths because of the mercury; many children were born with severe
physical and mental disabilities. The company denied that its plant was the
cause, and continued to dump toxic effluent into the bay even after
the mercury poisoning was scientifically confirmed in 1956. For years, the
Japanese and local governments colluded with the company in the cover-up.
Ishimure’s book brought attention to the plight of Minamata and encouraged
readers to reconsider the meaning of economic progress at any price.
In Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow Ishimure used her writing to bring to life the
voices of witnesses, in their local dialect, and to transcend the boundaries
between the living and the spirits of the dead. Ishimure also describes the

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initial refusal of intellectuals in Tokyo to acknowledge the extent of this

tragedy in this distant fishing community. Even the industrial workers and
middle-class residents of the Minamata area tended to discriminate against
the patients, fearing that their claims would threaten the prosperity of their
community and their lifestyle. The text also evokes the beautiful mountains
and bay at Minamata, all the while poisoned by the wastes of progress. In the
words of her translator Livia Monnet, the text has “magico-religious, spiritual
dimensions,” as the narrator acts “as a medium or shaman for the resentful
spirits and ghosts of those who died.”
From the 1970s, a period marked by economic prosperity and solidification
of the urban middle class, male writers such as Furui Yoshikichi (b. 1937),
Gotō Meisei (1932–99), Abe Akira (1934–89), and Kuroi Senji (b. 1932) explored
in their fiction the complex inner lives of people living in cities. This focus on
subjectivity and mental states earned the diverse group of writers the label
naikō no sedai (introverted generation), intended originally as a criticism of
the apparent lack of attention to social issues in their writing. Furui’s
Akutagawa Prize winning novella Yōko (1971) begins with the line “Yōko
was sitting alone at the bottom of a deep ravine,” suggesting her literal and
figurative isolation, as well as her inability to function socially and emotion-
ally. The narrator delineates Yōko’s isolation in terms of pathology and
mental illness (eating disorders and neurosis), but more powerfully describes
an interiority that comes into contact with other worlds that evoke Japanese
myth and shamanism and that hover between death and life. Furui’s work
destabilizes the notion of a unitary self by suggesting the multiple senses of
subjectivity encompassed in each character – some rational and social, others
fusing with a nostalgic sense of community or spirituality. Furui’s fiction
emphasizes the precariousness of negotiating urban life as it rushes forward
into the future, heedless of the complex and conflicting psychological and
spiritual needs of today’s human beings.

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 76
Women’s fiction in the postwar era
sharalyn orbaugh

Japan was at war, effectively if not officially, from 1931 to 1945. After its
surrender Japan was governed by the Allied Occupation forces from
September 1945 until regaining sovereignty in April 1952. It is not surprising
that a decade and a half of war followed by nearly seven years of foreign
occupation should have a large influence on any nation’s subsequent literary
production. In the case of Japan the pervasiveness of the militarist rhetoric,
the wholesale devastation of the cities by explosive, incendiary and atomic
bombs, and the psychic and material repercussions of unconditional surren-
der created a situation in which echoes and influences of the war and its
aftermath resonated strongly for several decades. The so-called “postwar
period” lasted at least until the mid 1980s, when Japan’s preeminent eco-
nomic prosperity and international stature allowed for new kinds of national
self-definition.
The resonances of war and Occupation did not affect everyone in the same
way. The idealized men and women of propaganda and the actual roles
assigned to men and women meant that wartime and Occupation period
experiences were highly differentiated by gender. As a result, the postwar
literature produced between 1945 and 1985 is also in many cases distinctly
gendered. In tracing the influences of the war and the Allied Occupation on
the prose literature produced by women in that forty-year period it is
essential to note the nature and causes of these differences.
During the years of increasing militarism in the 1930s and into the 1940s,
both women and men were assigned important roles to play in the imperial
project, but those roles were very different. Men were liable to induction –
into the military or into various kinds of factory work – contributing directly
to the waging of the war. Women’s roles were, at first, less directly related to
the military aspects of war. Women were encouraged to bear as many
healthy children as possible as part of the kodakara butai (the “childbearing
troop”), and all contraception was banned. They were encouraged to join

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local chapters of national women’s organizations that explicitly supported the

war effort.
As the war intensified and able-bodied men were increasingly scarce,
women’s roles became more active: women were put in charge of food
rationing and neighborhood safety drills; they were drafted into munitions
factories or were charged with growing food and delivering quotas to the
government; they had to worry about fathers, sons, and brothers in the
military; they had to try to keep life together for dependent family members
as food, medicine, fuel, and commodities grew ever scarcer; and finally they
had to cope with the effects of air raids, fires, homelessness, and disease.
It was not just the real-life wartime roles that were gendered; the meta-
phorical or symbolic meanings of masculinity and femininity, used perva-
sively in propaganda, were complementary. The iconic symbol of
masculinity was the soldier, exerting himself valiantly and unstintingly for
the empire until his death in battle. The symbol of femininity was the flower
nadeshiko (Dianthus superbus), signifying a sweet, demure, endlessly self-
sacrificing woman. This image of unspoiled maidenliness was held up as
the ideal for women to aspire to being, and the ideal that men were fighting
to protect. Although Japanese women did contribute in myriad material ways
to the war effort, in propaganda the main task projected for them throughout
the war was to keep the home fires burning through their domestic labor and,
if married, to produce children for the sake of the imperial mission.
The seven years of the Allied Occupation saw significant psychological and
material improvements brought to women’s lives by the new Constitution
(1947) and other social and juridical changes: the right to vote, equal rights in
marriage, and equal opportunities for education. For men, the Occupation
had fewer positive effects, at least in psychological terms. The Tokyo War
Crimes Trial brought to international consciousness the atrocities committed
by Japanese soldiers: men – civilians, soldiers, and politicians – were held
responsible for the conception and execution of what was figured in the court
as an unjust war. Even from a more nationalistic point of view, it was men
who had failed to win the war, and who had accepted “unconditional
surrender.” Women’s participation in activities that had supported the war
effort was virtually absent from the indictments of the War Crimes Trials
held throughout Asia, or the self-flagellating rhetoric that lamented Japan’s
defeat.
In practical terms, however, many women experienced grave hardship
when the war ended. Many were faced with the news that their fathers,
husbands, or sons would not be returning, so that they would remain solely

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responsible for keeping their dependants fed and clothed under material
circumstances that were in some ways just as difficult as the worst months
of wartime. Japan’s worst food crisis in modern times occurred in 1946, after
the war was over. Many women, although continuing to be the sole support
of their children, lost their wartime jobs and joined the huge ranks of the
unemployed as returning men were given precedence in hiring. The presence
of a large occupying army, lack of food, and no access to gainful employment
led to a rise in prostitution.
All of these differences in male and female experience in modernizing and
militarizing Japan – before, during, and immediately after the war – are
visible in the gendered nature of much postwar literature.
The immediate effects of the war on women’s writing can be seen by
looking at publishing statistics. Women’s share of annual literary publications
had grown rapidly from about 10 percent of the total in 1930 to nearly 20
percent of the total in 1940.1 Publications by both men and women were
curtailed between 1941 and 1945, because of the exigencies of the Pacific War.
Once the war ended, however, literary journals were relaunched, paper
shortages eased, and the literary world came back to life. Nonetheless, during
the years of the Occupation (1945–52), women’s share of literary production
fell steeply from its 1940 level, returning to 10 percent. Although the defeat
had brought a respite from the wartime demands on women’s labor and
attention, and although many gains were made in women’s rights during this
period, it remained an extremely difficult time in material terms. After 1953,
however, the percentage share of literary production by women once again
rose: in 1956 it was 15 percent, and in 1958, 18 percent. This slow but steady rise
continued throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, paralleling improvements in
women’s educational opportunities, economic prosperity, and a general
boom in literary activity.
Another way to grasp the gendered changes in postwar literature can be
seen by looking at the distribution of the literary awards that were and
continue to be significant in the insular world of Japanese publishing. One
of the most prestigious is the Akutagawa Prize, given twice annually to the
best piece of (high-culture) prose fiction by an emerging author and often
acting as a gateway to a distinguished literary career. In the two decades
between its inception in 1935 and 1954, the Akutagawa Prize went only twice

1
Figures for all publishing data derived from Yoshida Sei’ichi, Gendai Nihon bungaku nenpyō
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1958); Muramatsu Sadataka and Watanabe Sumiko, Gendai josei
bungaku jiten (Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 1990); and Odagiri Susumu, Nihon kindai
bungaku nenpyō (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1993); calculations by the author.

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to women: Nakazato Tsuneko (1909–87) in 1939 and Shibaki Yoshiko (1914–91)

in 1942. Expressed as a percentage, women won the award 6 percent of the
time. In the decade from 1955 to 1964, however, women were awarded the
Akutagawa Prize 12.5 percent of the time, rising to 26 percent in the decade
from 1965 to 1974, and again to 35 percent between 1975 and 1984.
Other literary prizes had similar gendered trajectories, with women wri-
ters represented in greater numbers beginning in the late 1950s. The Noma
Prize, for example, which is given annually to an outstanding new literary
work and had never gone to a female-authored publication, was awarded in
1957 to two novels by female authors: Enchi Fumiko (1905–86) for Onnazaka
(literally, Women’s Hill, translated as The Waiting Years, 1949–57) and Uno
Chiyo (1897–1996) for Ohan (Ohan, 1947–57). The Naoki Prize, which is given
twice yearly to the best piece of middlebrow prose fiction, was awarded to
only one woman in the two decades between 1935 and 1954, Koyama Itoko
(1901–89), in 1950 (3.5 percent of total winners). Between 1955 and 1964,
however, the percentage of female winners shot up to 21 percent before
waning somewhat in later decades. Not only were women recognized for
their publications but they were also invited to join literary prize committees
themselves, with Kōno Taeko (1926–2015) and Ōba Minako (1930–2007) ser-
ving on the Akutagawa Prize committee, for example.
As noted, only 10 percent of the literary works published between 1945 and
1952 were by women authors. Not only was the percentage of Occupation
period publication by women small, but also the number of women writing
was very limited: three women – Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), Hayashi
Fumiko (1903–51), and Sata Ineko (1904–98) – accounted for fully one third
of all female literary publications, and more than half of all publications by
women were produced by just six female authors. All of these prolific authors
were born well before the war and already had established writing careers.
Many of them had also been involved in prewar left-wing movements. Unlike
the so-called Third Generation of New Writers (Dai-san no shinjin) – an
important new wave of young male authors that emerged after the war,
most of whom were born around 1920 – there was no similar groundswell of
new, young female talent.
Virtually all of the women who did manage to publish during the
Occupation focused on a similar theme: the real-life situation of ordinary
people as they were affected by the war and its aftermath. Unlike the
surrealistic, darkly humorous, self-satirizing tone that characterized the
work of male writers of the period, such as Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006) or
Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013), the fiction produced by women tended to be

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realistic depictions of the day-to-day problems of finding food and shelter for
oneself and one’s children in the absence of a husband and all the other social
safety nets of prewar society. Prostitutes and desperate mothers – and some
women who are both – are the paradigmatic figures in immediate postwar
fiction by women. Unlike the prostitutes that populate the fiction of male
nikutai bungaku (literature of the flesh) writers, the sex worker protagonists of
female-authored stories are neither sexualized nor glorified; they are strug-
gling to survive in challenging conditions.
Despite the dire circumstances addressed, the majority of the immediate
postwar stories published by women are concerned with the process of
reconstructing the home, even if it is a barely intact structure enclosing a
newly imagined type of family. This is in contrast to the radically decon-
structed home and social structures highlighted in the work of many postwar
male authors.
One of the best-known short stories of the postwar period, for example,
is Hayashi Fumiko’s “Hone” (Bones, 1949), about a middle-class war
widow, Michiko, who is left as the sole support of her young daughter as
well as her ailing father and bedridden brother. After losing her wartime
factory job and falling ill with tuberculosis, Michiko begins a life of prostitu-
tion to make enough money to feed her family. Although she suffers from
guilt at the thought of her betrayal of the prewar middle-class value system
she used to live by – symbolized in the story by the recurring figure of a
woman in a white apron with a baby carriage – Michiko gradually recovers
a sense that she and her daughter will survive this low period (though her
father and brother will not) and return to a stable life. Many of Hayashi’s
postwar works feature similarly melodramatic elements – wives whose
chastity has been compromised by the desperate circumstances of the war
and its aftermath – but those works resolutely refuse to pursue dramatic,
tragic narrative resolutions. Instead the dominant message is that lives –
particularly women’s lives – will go on.
In the 1930s and early 1940s Hayashi had helped to support the war effort by
serving in China as a special correspondent for the Mainichi and Asahi news-
papers, but the wartime experiences of her contemporary, Hirabayashi
Taiko, followed a different path (though one also typical for a number of
women writers). Involved with anarchist groups from the 1920s, Hirabayashi
spent most of the war years – from 1937 to 1945 – imprisoned for left-wing
activities. Because she was suffering from tuberculosis, too, when she was not
in prison she struggled just to stay alive. Hirabayashi was very quick to
publish once the war was over. “Hitori yuku” (Going on Alone, 1946), for

741
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example, is an autobiographical account of her years spent incarcerated while

the war raged outside. It ends with her joyous relief when she is finally
released from prison and admitted into a hospital where her tuberculosis will
be treated. Another story published in 1946, “Otete tsunaide” (Holding
Hands), takes up the problem of children orphaned by the war. The prota-
gonist, Keiko, has adopted a young orphaned girl, but finds that the time and
effort of childcare is interfering with the important work she wants to do
toward improving women’s rights now that the war is over and democracy is
being promoted. Keiko ultimately decides to send the girl to another family,
which she believes will be better for both of them.
A large percentage of the fiction by women writers produced between
1945 and 1955 gestures toward the fact that women’s bodies and minds
had been mobilized during wartime (and leading up to it) in ways very
different from men’s. The focus in many stories on “inappropriate”
sexuality and “inconvenient” children reflects the fact that women’s
social education for more than forty years had been concentrated on
motherhood and women’s proper role in the proper multigeneration
family, in the service of the empire. The circumstances of the war and
its immediate aftermath had shattered the cohesive images so prevalent
in wartime propaganda, and fiction by female writers reveals the ways
that those prewar ideologies had controlled and betrayed women. When
the war came to an end, women found themselves facing the very real,
immediate, and embodied consequences (as in children and other depen-
dants) of those ideologies. The realist mode that characterizes their
Occupation period fiction reflects the necessity for women and men to
find a way to survive until new categories of national and self-identity
can be constructed, and perhaps to take an active political role, like
Hirabayashi’s protagonist Keiko, in creating those new identities.
By the end of the Allied Occupation in 1952 the nation was beginning to
show signs of recovery from the devastation of war. The outbreak of the
Korean War in 1950 had only increased American–Japanese interdependence,
through the network of US military bases that remained after the Occupation
ended. Although the existence of the bases was a contentious issue, the
presence of US servicemen and the USA’s continued investment in
Japanese infrastructure throughout the 1950s (and into the Cold War era
that followed) undoubtedly aided in Japan’s economic recovery. Japan’s
“economic miracle” of annual double-digit economic growth began in the
mid 1950s and continued through the 1960s, leading to increased material
wellbeing for most of its citizens.

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 Women’s fiction in the postwar era

This economic and social recovery led to a resurgence of literary

productivity, including among women, in the second half of the 1950s.
The female writers who attained prominence in this period were gen-
erally of a higher social class and better educated than their predecessors:
Enchi Fumiko and Kōda Aya (1904–90), for example, were both daugh-
ters of extremely eminent men of letters – linguist Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–
1937) and writer Kōda Rohan (1867–1947) respectively. Another important
woman who emerged in the 1950s was Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–84), who
had graduated from a Japanese women’s college and had traveled abroad
to study. The activities of these women, and others such as Sono Ayako
(b. 1931), led literary critic Usui Yoshimi (1905–87) to declare the period a
saijo jidai (era of talented women).
Among these talented women Enchi Fumiko garnered the greatest reputa-
tion. Although Enchi had begun her writing career before the war with plays
and essays in literary journals, she was not well known until her long novel
Onnazaka was serialized, beginning in 1949. Onnazaka was completed in 1957
and was followed in 1958 by Onnamen (literally, Women’s Masks, translated as
Masks). These two novels – conspicuous for the word “woman/women”
(onna) in their titles – comprise harsh indictments of the prewar ie (house-
hold) system within which women had no legal rights and were important
only to the extent that they pleased their husbands and bore them suitable
children. Enchi makes little direct reference to the war in Onnamen, and none
in Onnazaka, which is set entirely in the prewar period, but her criticisms of
the ie system resonate fully with the images of proper womanhood that had
prevailed in militarist and imperialist propaganda. Moreover, the fact that
Enchi wrote these two dark novels ten years after the granting of political
rights to women during the Occupation suggests that she was pessimistic
about the degree of improvement such juridical changes would bring; she
implies that the old systems, though no longer legally in force, continue to
configure gender roles in society and the family. At the same time, her works
also imply that individual women have many choices when it comes to
colluding with or resisting intransigent social systems.
Enchi’s fiction is notable for its deployment of the fantastic or occult as a
mode for revealing the psychological depth of women’s inner life and the
subtle connections between women, while simultaneously challenging
the dominance of consensus reality (the patriarchal legacy of the ie system).
The family is again being reimagined, but Enchi’s work takes a step away
from the realist mode dominant in women’s writing during the immediate
postwar period.

743
 sharalyn orbaugh

Many important male writers from the late 1950s and through the 1960s
concerned themselves with Japan’s place in Cold War geopolitical align-
ments, and particularly with the question of Japanese masculinity during a
period that was marked by vigorous economic recovery but continued
reliance on the USA for military protection. Women writers of this period,
however, appeared far less concerned with Japan’s international orientations.
As influential male critic Etō Jun (1932–99) argued, women’s literature at this
time comprised the “personal statements of women who were made to bear
serious responsibility for the heavy burden of the bōkoku [the national defeat
in WWII].” They share this responsibility with the men, but, in Etō’s view,
respond to it differently:
[I]n order to gloss over the humiliation of “national defeat,” men have built
up elaborate bluffing self-deceptions, but women on the contrary have tried
to throw themselves bodily into the fissures between reality and the fabrica-
tions created by these ruined men.
(“Michisū no sugomi,” Gunzō, June 1968, emphasis added)

Male writer and Gunzō Prize committee member Yasuoka Shōtarō con-
curred, saying the writing of women in the 1960s was osorubeki: terrifying
or ghastly (in its brilliance) (“Osorubeki joryū,” Gunzō, June 1968). These
views may be overly dichotomized, but Etō is correct that the gendered/
sexed body becomes a crucial element in the fiction of many of the emerging
female writers in this period, often deployed in terrifying or ghastly ways,
with the explicit intention of revealing and destabilizing entrenched power
structures. Kōno Taeko (1926–2015), Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005), Mori
Mari (1903–87), Ōba Minako (1930–2007), and Takahashi Takako (1932–2013)
concentrated much of their creative energy on exploring the nature of sex,
gender, and sexuality, and the social and political structures – such as the
family – that configured those concepts. In this sense they followed in the
footsteps of the female authors of the Occupation period such as Hayashi
Fumiko and Hirabayashi Taiko. But, building on the work of Enchi Fumiko
perhaps, a large percentage of the significant fiction published by women in
the 1960s and 70s makes use of a fantastic or science-fiction-like mode, and
includes graphic and disturbing scenes of physical or psychological abnorm-
ality, violence, and grotesque sexuality, as well as more gentle challenges to
consensus reality.
Akutagawa Prize winner Kōno Taeko, for example, gained prominence
through her many works that featured a childless woman who enjoys violent
masochistic sex. The complex ways in which masochism can expose and then

744
 Women’s fiction in the postwar era

challenge traditional power hierarchies is explored in depth in her shocking

1964 story “Yōjigari” (Toddler Hunting), in which a woman derives sexual
pleasure from fantasizing the horrific beating and torture of a boy who
represents herself. Other works in this vein include “Ari takaru” (Ants
Swarm), and the later novel Mı¯ratori ryōkitan (The Bizarre Tale of the
Mummy Hunter, 1990), in which a woman learns to feign cruelty in order
to please her masochistic husband. Through the masochistic relationships her
protagonists enjoy, Kōno’s works reveal the particularities of socially con-
structed gender roles, showing how a woman may be exerting dominance
exactly at the moment she seems most vulnerable, or may be most acquies-
cent when she seems most cruel.
Kurahashi Yumiko, deeply versed in contemporary French literature,
engaged themes that many readers and critics found shocking – threesomes,
incest (brother–sister), self-mutilation, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, and,
like Kōno, sadomasochism – couched in a fantastic, surreal, or parodic
mode. The intent of these themes was not sensationalism, but rather to
dispute the binary nature of self and other, female and male, and to challenge
the idea of a unitary, autonomous human subject as the basis for social and
political power structures.
The 1960s fiction of literary daughter Mori Mari – her father was the
eminent Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) – approached gender and sexuality from a
different direction, but one that was similarly shocking to some readers. Her
trilogy of novellas from the early 1960s, “Kareha no nedoko” (Bed of
Withered Leaves, 1962), “Nichiyōbi ni wa boku wa ikanai” (I’m Not
Coming on Sunday, 1962), and “Koibitotachi no mori” (The Lovers’ Forest,
1961), featured male homosexual protagonists, but, as Kazumi Nagaike has
argued, these highly aestheticized, unrealistic narratives actually worked to
highlight and deconstruct social myths of femininity and female sexuality
rather than attempting to depict accurately the lives of gay men.
Some women writers of the 1960s and 70s preferred to use a more realist
mode (though including elements of “magical realism”) in their contestations
of traditional gender roles. Ōba Minako and Takahashi Takako, for example,
feature protagonists who are lonely even in the midst of “idyllic” middle-class
marriages and families, with problematic mother–daughter relationships
highlighted in stories such as Ōba’s “Sanbiki no kani” (The Three Crabs,
1968) or “Yamauba no bishō” (The Smile of a Mountain Witch, 1976), and
Takahashi’s “Sōjikei” (Congruent Figures, 1971). In attempting to bring
mothers into the position of speaker or subject, Ōba and Takahashi contested
the relegation of “the mother” to nothing more than what Marianne Hirsch

745
 sharalyn orbaugh

terms the “object” or “ground” against which the child’s subjectivity is

developed, and simultaneously contested the idealized image of “mother-
hood for the state” that had been prevalent in earlier decades.2
As we see in Ōba’s “Yamauba no bishō,” in contesting the traditional
“family romance” women authors often employed the figure of the yamauba
(or yamanba), a demon woman of the mountains familiar from Japanese
folklore. The attributes of the yamauba stand for the reverse of the sanc-
tioned image of women: living alone in the mountains rather than in the
domestic urban household; devouring rather than bearing and rearing chil-
dren; killing handsome young men rather than becoming docile wives; and
having the ability to change form to entice unwary travelers, as opposed to
the guileless and ever-true nadeshiko flower of wartime feminine imagery.
The 1970s saw the debut of the first generation of writers who were born
after the end of the war, Kanai Mieko (b. 1947) and Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947)
prominent among them. Later in her career Kanai turned to realist fiction and
novels of manners, but her first stories, published in the early 1970s, replicate
the disturbing themes employed by Kōno and Kurahashi: incest (father–
daughter), self-mutilation, hermaphroditism, and so on, and for the same
purpose: an exploration of the power structures that underpin social arrange-
ments such as gender and familial roles, to further undermine the lingering
traces of the prewar ie system. But Kanai’s concerns exceed the national
boundaries and political history of Japan (as did Kurahashi’s). Her characters
are often nameless archetypes (father, prostitute, real estate agent), living in
unspecified and ambiguous locations, and her stories include numerous
references to non-Japanese literature and art. Her graphically violent short
story “Usagi” (Rabbits, 1972), for example, which concerns the relationship
between female literary expression and the psychic mess resulting from
traditional family roles, takes its inspiration from Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.
Tsushima Yūko, in contrast, sets her early stories, all in a realist mode, in
easily recognizable Japanese locations. The protagonists of her works defy
social convention by having and raising children out of wedlock. Her 1980
novel Yama o hashiru onna (Woman Running in the Mountains, trans. 1991),
for example, features a protagonist who is pregnant and unmarried, bringing
embarrassment to the parents with whom she lives, but ultimately affirming
the possibility of creating new, viable forms of family outside of traditional

2
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

746
 Women’s fiction in the postwar era

institutional structures. (Tsushima draws on the figure of the yamauba in this

novel.) In 1982’s “Danmari ichi” (The Silent Traders) she explores the rami-
fications of these new family structures for the children that inhabit them,
again coming to an affirmative conclusion.
A final trend in postwar women’s writing deserves mention: the emer-
gence of expatriate writers such as Ōba Minako and Kometani Fumiko
(b. 1930), both of whom began their literary careers while living in the
United States and writing about Japanese characters coping within unfamiliar
cultural currents. For both Ōba and Kometani the differences between
Japanese and North American people are significant, but not intimidating;
their characters function with grace and depth in their new environments.
Both authors won the Akutagawa Prize (Ōba in 1968; Kometani in 1985 for
Sugikoshi no matsuri [Passover]), suggesting the appeal of these successfully
internationalized characters within the literary establishment, possibly
because of the contrast with the geopolitical unease and dependence still
commonly thematized in much male-authored fiction of the period.

747
 77
The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’
culture
yuika kitamura

The genre of comic books in Western culture is associated with young male
readers, but in modern Japan comic books (manga) became closely associated
with female readers and writers. Shōjo manga (girls’ comics) appeared as early
as the 1910s. In 1899, the Girls’ High School Order was promulgated, with
girls separated from boys in a single-sex school system and the school
curriculum aiming to make good wives and wise mothers. This gender
separation created the concept of shōjo (girls), consequently giving birth to
girls’ culture. Teenage magazines, which began appearing at the end of 1880s,
at first targeted girls as well as boys in spite of such titles as Shōnen no sono
(Boys’ Garden), but they began to be separated by gender soon after the
genderization of education that occurred after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–
5). In 1902, Shōjokai (Girls’ World), the first shōjo zasshi (girls’ magazine)
appeared, followed by many other girls’ magazines. Readers of those maga-
zines were limited – mainly, girls of the middle or upper class who could go to
girls’ high schools (which constituted only 10–20 percent of all girls), but these
girls’ magazines became an essential part of the pre-World War II girls’
culture.
The prewar girls’ magazines carried a few humorous comic strips in simple
square-shaped koma (frames) arranged in orderly rows. Most popular, how-
ever, were shōjo shōsetsu (girls’ novels), which were illustrated. Particularly
popular was Yoshiya Nobuko’s (1896–1973) stories accompanied by Nakahara
Jun’ichi’s (1913–83) illustrations, both of which had a great influence on
postwar shōjo manga. Female readers shared their enthusiasm for these
illustrated stories by contributing letters to the “readers’ section” of the
magazines.
After the hiatus of the Pacific War, a period of tight government control,
censorship, and paper rationing, girls’ magazines revived – a revival that
included prewar style girls’ novels but also actively carried Western girls’
novels, articles on fashion, news on Hollywood stars and Japanese celebrities,

748
 The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’ culture

and girls’ manga. The translations of Western girls’ novels such as Anne of
Green Gables (Akage no an, Japanese translation by Muraoka Hanako [1893–
1968], 1952) deeply appealed to postwar girls along with American movies.
The admiration for Western culture had a great effect on girls’ manga – their
locales, characters, and stories – especially up until the 1970s.
“Story manga” (comics with stories) came to the forefront in postwar girls’
magazines, with Tezuka Osamu’s (1928–89) Ribon no kishi (Princess Knight,
1953–6) proving a great success. Takahashi Makoto, another noted manga
writer, combined story manga with lyric illustrations. He drew brilliant
illustrations of girls in freely arranged frames – like a three-column frame
to depict melodramatic stories such as Arashi o koete (After a Storm, 1958).
Girls’ manga gradually became more original, focusing on human psychol-
ogy and using flexible frames. By contrast, boys’ manga represented action
(such as sports and violence) in movie-like square frames.
In the 1960s, love became a popular theme in girls’ manga. Mizuno
Hideko’s (b. 1939) Hoshi no tategoto (The Harp of Star, 1960) was the first
girls’ manga that depicted love between a man and a woman (a prince and a
princess in a northern European myth). Another good example is Nishitani
Yoshiko’s (b. 1943) Remon to sakuranbo (Lemons and Cherries, 1966), which
described teenage love and ordinary high school life in Japan.
The percentage of manga grew larger and larger in girls’ magazines, while
girls’ novels gradually lost popularity. From the end of the 1950s, weekly and
monthly magazines that were based strictly on girls’ manga proliferated. This
created a demand for new manga writers, and many magazines encouraged
readers to submit their own manga. Editors selected potential contributors,
trained them, and debuted them in their magazines. Girls’ manga writers
were now mostly women, and the age difference between writers and read-
ers grew smaller.
Girls’ manga made a dramatic breakthrough in the 1970s. Sophisticated
techniques were developed, including the extremely flexible layout of
frames, tenbyō (stippling drawing), and kakeami (handwritten net-drawings);
and a large number of words – speech, internal thought, narration, and
authorial commentary – were artfully arranged not only inside but also
outside the fukidashi (balloons). These enabled girls’ manga to feature extre-
mely complicated stories and minutely detailed psychological description.
It was also around this time that the Hana no nijū-yonen-gumi (The Flowery
Year-Twenty-Four Group, the women comic writers born around 1949)
became active. (They are also referred to as the Forty-Niners.) Many of
their works are now considered classics of girls’ manga. Tōma no shinzō

749
 yuika kitamura

(The Heart of Thomas, 1974–5) by Hagio Moto (b. 1949) is one of them. The
locale is a boys’ boarding school (gymnasium) in West Germany. The main
characters are Juli, the protagonist, and two other boys, Oskar and Erich.
This manga opens with the death of Thomas Werner, a thirteen-year-old
boy in the school. Tōma no shinzō is full of mysteries – Thomas’s death, Juli’s
detached behavior, Oskar’s real father, and Erich’s sickness – which are
explored in depth and through very subtle drawings. At the end, each boy
grows up, and Juli decides to become a priest and leaves the boarding
school.
Girls’ manga by the Forty-Niners bear close similarities to serious novels.
Tōma no shinzō has the atmosphere of German Bildungsroman, dealing with
religion, death, love, (sexual) violence, and racism. Other Forty-Niners wrote
compelling – sometimes controversial – stories on diverse themes like eternal
life (Hagio, Pō no ichizoku [The Clan of Po], 1972–6), the pregnancy of a
teenage girl (Ōshima Yumiko [b. 1947], Tanjō [Birth], 1970), and homosexual
love (Takemiya Keiko [b. 1950], Kaze to ki no uta [The Sound of the Wind and
Trees], 1976–84).
Another related movement in the 1970s was otomechikku manga (maidenly
comics). They established a major theme of girls’ manga – love and self-
affirmation brought about by a man (boy). The cute and romantic items
illustrated in this genre (e.g. homemade cookies, a bouquet of petite flowers,
white lace curtains over French windows) helped to develop the concept of
kawaii (cute), one of the major characteristics of Japanese girls’ culture.
In the 1970s, Japan witnessed a women’s liberation movement. More than
30 percent of the high school girls went to college or junior college. Women’s
participation in society increased and their lifestyle diversified, but there were
still many tight restrictions. Both the Forty-Niner Group’s manga and oto-
mechikku manga show women and girls struggling to find their own space
and a different means of self-expression. The Forty-Niners, for instance, often
chose boys as main characters, as in Tōma no shinzō. They created new
possibilities under the guise of “boy” characters, who were free from the
restrictions on women in the real world. They also explored sexuality and
eroticism, which had been a major taboo for girls’ manga. BL (boys’ love)
comics – manga on love between boys – was also born in the 1970s and
became an integral part of girls’ manga.
With the development of girls’ manga in the 1970s, the readership gradu-
ally expanded to adult women (and sometimes men), which led in the 1980s
to new girls’ manga magazines targeting readers of different age groups, such
as a new genre called redı¯su komikku (ladies’ comics). Ladies’ comics,

750
 The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’ culture

Figure 3. Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas, trans. Matt Thorn (Seattle, 2012). Juli talks to
Erich about his feelings toward the deceased Thomas. Juli’s thoughts are represented
outside the balloons. Fantagraphics Books.

751
 yuika kitamura

characterized by extensive description of sex, enjoyed a publication boom in

the late 1980s.
Girls’ manga in the 1980s often involve groups of teenagers. Yoshida
Akimi’s (b. 1956) Banana fisshu (Banana Fish, 1985–94), for example, describes
friendship and (non-sexual) love between Ash, a teenage street gang leader in
New York, and Eiji, an ordinary Japanese boy. It has a large-scale cast of
gangsters, mafia, and politicians working in the United States.
In the 1990s, a new genre of yangu redı¯su (young ladies’) comics emerged; it
was an intermediate genre between girls’ manga and ladies’ comics, and
described various problems of young women at work (such as relationships
with colleagues, career achievement, and private life). Sentō bishōjo (Beautiful
Fighting Girl) also became a keyword for the 1990s. Takeuchi Naoko’s (b.
1967) Bishōjo senshi Sērā Mūn (Sailor Moon, 1992–7) is a good example. It
attracted younger readers as well as foreign readers. (It was at about this time
that Japanese comics began to be translated into foreign languages and
became a global subculture.)
Rekishi fantajı¯ (historical fantasy) and wa-mono (comics that describe
Japanese traditional culture) have been in the forefront in the first decade
of the twenty-first century. Yoshinaga Fumi’s (b. 1971) Ōoku (The Inner
Chambers, 2005–), an internationally acclaimed historical fantasy, depicts a
transgendered world in the Edo castle where the shōgun is female and her
wife and mistresses are male. It won the 2009 James Tiptree Jr. Award for
science fiction or fantasy that promotes a better understanding of gender.
Girls’ manga, which grew from modest beginnings, has played a crucial
role in girls’ culture in the postwar period. More recently it has been
expanding beyond girls’ culture to win a wider readership, including adult
women, boys, men, and international audiences.

752
 78
Modern Japanese literature from
Okinawa
davinder l. bhowmik

In 1879, a decade after the formation of the nation-state of Japan, the Japanese
government annexed the Ryūkyū Islands of which Okinawa is part, and
began to strongly promote assimilation. This was largely carried out top-
down in the school system, which required students to use standard Japanese
and punished those who lapsed into Okinawa dialect. While modern poetry
and drama were among the first literary genres in Japanese to emerge in this
environment, prose fiction, owing to the time it took for authors to master
Japanese, did not appear until the first decade of the twentieth century.
“Kunenbo” (Mandarin Oranges), published by Yamagusuku Seichū (1884–
1949) in the journal Hototogisu (Cuckoo) in 1911, garnered the attention of
critics for its arresting display of local color, then much in demand. In
addition to showcasing the Okinawa region, the story, set during the Sino-
Japanese war (1894–5), depicts a fractured society in part loyal to China and
resistant to the incursions of modernity, and in part pursuing modernity
through an allegiance to Japan. “Kunenbo,” which features local color and
resistance to political authority, begs the question of just what literature from
Okinawa is – regional or minority? The literary successes that followed
“Kunenbo” contain not only some degree of regional flourishes, which
serve as a balm to the urban weary, but also a certain degree of resistance
to the notion of Okinawans as ethnic minorities.
Whereas identity is a clear theme of prewar literature from Okinawa, after
the devastating spring 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which the Japanese Imperial
Army indiscriminately killed civilians, executed Okinawans who spoke in
dialect, and forced civilian suicides, the battle and its after effects became a
major theme of postwar writing. Among this literature, of particular note is
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s (b. 1925) Kakuteru pātı¯ (The Cocktail Party), published in
1967, and awarded Okinawa’s first Akutagawa Prize. Though set in the period
of the American occupation, the novella, which centers on an Okinawan
man’s efforts to fight for justice after the rape of his daughter by an American

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 davinder l. bhowmik

soldier, is eerily timeless. Okinawa’s subjugated position is evident in

Okinawa’s troubled history, from as early as 1609 when the Shimazu clan
from Satsuma invaded the Ryūkyū Islands and set into place colonial rule, to
decades of prewar discrimination, the Battle of Okinawa, the prolonged
American occupation, and the reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972
(without the removal of American military bases). These historical events
as well as the recurring rape of Okinawan girls and women, such as the
infamous 1995 rape of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl by three US military
servicemen, make The Cocktail Party a sobering read.
Just as discussions of the US–Japan Security Treaty made Okinawa daily
newspaper fare in 1967 when Ōshiro won his prize, the eve of Okinawa’s
reversion saw Higashi Mineo (b. 1938) win the Akutagawa Prize for Okinawa
no shōnen (The Child of Okinawa, 1971), a work that depicts a military base
town through the eyes of a child. International attention paid to the 1995 rape
kept Okinawa the object of media scrutiny and no doubt resulted in judges
selecting Matayoshi Eiki’s (b. 1947) novel on Okinawan burial customs, Buta
no mukui (The Pig’s Revenge), for the Akutagawa Prize in 1996.
Perhaps the only Akutagawa Prize winning work from Okinawa not
directly linked to contemporary politics is Medoruma Shun’s (b. 1960)
“Suiteki” (Droplets), which won in 1997. The literary merit of Medoruma’s
magic realist tale of a sanshin-playing, Orion beer drinking, womanizing
farmer and his rascally cousin is plain to see. But Medoruma also builds
into his story of a rural farmer the theme of wartime memory, taking great
pains to distinguish the private from the public.
Though “Droplets” brought Medoruma fame in 1997, he had been publish-
ing stories locally since the early 1980s and continues to write much longer
fiction today. In addition to writing lengthier works, another discernible shift
from the early to more recent stories is that his protagonists are more likely to
be strong and violent than weak and passive. In 1999 Medoruma published in
the Asahi newspaper “Kibō” (Hope), an ironic short story that some took to
be non-fiction. In this story, in which the 1995 rape serves as a backdrop, the
protagonist, an Okinawan who has just strangled to death an American child,
reflects that his is a crime both natural and inevitable for those without
power, who are forced to live under conditions of constant fear. In subse-
quent novels Medoruma’s protagonists are perpetrators of violence instead of
victims of it.
It would be farfetched to state that Medoruma’s emboldened protagonists
reflect a strengthening body politic in Okinawa today, since the prefecture is
far from unified. Even so, one cannot ignore the fact that contemporary

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authors are increasingly taking on controversial subject matter. Mainland

author Ikezawa Natsuki (b. 1945), a long time resident of Okinawa, published
Kadena (Kadena, 2009), a work of historical fiction that has for its setting
Kadena Air Force Base, the largest military base in the Pacific. Ōshiro
Tatsuhiro also recently published a collection of short stories that focus on
another of Okinawa’s basetowns, Futenma, the city that surrounds Futenma
Marine Corps Air Station, slated since 1996 for relocation to Okinawa’s
pristine north. Both Kadena and Futenma yo make visible the irrepressible
violence contained in military structures so often described by critics as
naturalized or invisible.
By far the most daring but overshadowed of contemporary authors is
Sakiyama Tami (b. 1954). Like Medoruma, she has published stories since the
early 1980s, two of which were nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. Shortly
after the 9/11 attacks Sakiyama penned an essay in which she declared her
intention to bring into collision shima kotoba (island language) and Japanese.
This methodological shift, as evidenced in a series of seven stories published
in the literary journal Subaru in 2006–7, collectively known as the Kuja stories,
has made her writing challenging to say the least. Among several dying
dialects, Iriomote Island dialect dances on the pages of her stories together
with standard Japanese. So long as Sakiyama continues her bold project there
is no fear that modern Japanese literature from Okinawa is a superfluous
body of writing.

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 79
Postwar Zainichi writings: politics,
language, and identity
melissa l. wender

Language is front and center in postwar Zainichi writings: texts penned by

people of Korean descent residing in Japan. These authors began to compose
poetry and fiction in the Japanese language in a prewar colonial world in
which they were indubitably Korean, so they either wrote in Korean or wrote
in Japanese as a second language, highly conscious of using the language of
the colonizer. However, between the 1950s and the 1980s, they insinuated
their way into Japan’s literary scene in a different manner. Most of them were
authors with native proficiency in Japanese language, raised and acculturated
in Japan, but as resident aliens in Japan they were allied either with the North
(the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) or with the South (the
Republic of Korea, or ROK). Since then, their writing has taken a symboli-
cally prominent place in contemporary Japanese literature, as its most
important “minority” literature. Some writers even identify themselves,
borrowing the American turn of phrase, as “Korean Japanese.” In the postwar
period Zainichi literature is at least as influenced by Japanese context as it is
by Korean heritage: it is often written in the distinctly Japanese form of the
so-called autobiographical shishōsetsu or “I-novel,” and focused on people
negotiating an existence in Japan or as Japanized within Korea.
In 1945, when the war ended, approximately 2 million Koreans remained in
Japan, but their numbers soon shrank, since many hastened to return home,
and roughly 600,000 ended up staying. If the immediate postwar period was a
tumultuous era for everyone living in Japan, it was all the more so for those of
Korean descent. They soon found themselves stripped of Japanese citizenship
(they could apply for it, but it was difficult to get) and discriminated against as
they had been under colonialism, and their native country politically divided.
They also started to partition themselves into Left and Right, and by 1955 two
powerful groups – Sōren (short for Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin Sōrengōkai, or
General Assocation of Korean Residents in Japan) affiliated with the North,
and Mindan (short for Zai-Nihon Daikanminkoku Mindan, or Union of

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 Postwar Zainichi writings: politics, language, and identity

Korean Residents in Japan) with the South (Republic of Korea, or ROK) –

respectively. It was only in 1965, as a result of a treaty normalizing relations
between Japan and South Korea, that Mindan affiliates became able to
achieve ROK citizenship and with it permanent resident status in Japan;
only much later did the latter become possible for non-ROK citizens. As
members of a formerly colonized population facing discrimination, uncertain
legal status, and political segmentation, Zainichi authors have shared a
concern about hybrid identity, language, and culture with postcolonial and
minority writers elsewhere. The division of their homeland, however, has
meant that national affiliation takes on a particular significance for them.
Like their Japanese peers, these writers wrote in a literary world domi-
nated, at least at first, by the shishōsetsu. The form has been characterized as
an apolitical one, but if the content of one’s real life is filled with discrimina-
tion or memories of colonialism, the fiction itself takes on political implica-
tions even when it does not refer directly to political events. To read the
works of Kim Tal-su (1919–97), a devotee of Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) and
the first Zainichi writer to break into the Japanese publishing world in the
postwar period, is, as Kawamura Minato points out in his groundbreaking
Umaretara soko ga furusato (Home Is Where You’re Born, 1999), to read a
history of Zainichi political life. This is not to say that there are no personal
elements or literary devices in his work, but, as Tomi Suzuki has shown,
shishōsetsu is above all a practice of reading. And so it has been with Kim Tal-
su: readers have taken his works as a window into the realities of first-
generation Zainichi experience. Since he was not only surrounded by but
also engaged in the political struggles of his community, his work, however
fictional it might be, was able to serve as a political voice within the Japanese
intellectual world. At the much-examined ending to “Fuji no mieru mura de”
(In the Shadow of Fuji, 1952), after being rejected for his love interest in a
Japanese girl, the main character shoots a rifle at the iconic mountain. It does
not matter much whether the story is “true” or not: the crux is the very desire
of a Zainichi Korean to do such a thing, and the emotional release that this
symbolic murder of Japanese-ness would bring.
However, it was only with the next generation that the controversy over
the shishōsetsu form took center stage in the discussion of Zainichi fiction,
with a 1970 roundtable discussion by second-generation writer Ri Kaisei (b.
1935), first-generation writer and critic Kim Sŏk-pŏm (b. 1925), and the
Japanese novelist Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), published in the journal Bungaku
(Literature). Most memorable is Ri’s claim that Zainichi writers should seek
to affirm their Korean “identity” (borrowed from English), and both his and

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Ōe’s staunch opposition to Koreans’ assimilation, literary or otherwise.

Indeed, Ōe seems almost envious of Ri’s in-born opportunity to resist
Japanese-ness, with almost natural ways to twist the content, form, and
language of literature by weaving into it Korean-ness.
Just two years later, Ri Kaisei became the first Zainichi writer to be
crowned with the Akutagawa Prize for “Kinuta o utsu onna” (Woman
Who Beats the Fulling Block, 1972) in a story that did precisely that.
“Kinuta” thematically and in its very form questions the meanings of indivi-
dual lives in relationship to the national identities of Korea and Japan. It
travels through multiple voices and linguistic registers, including names in
Korean script, names in Japanese pronunciation, a sinse t’aryŏng or traditional
Korean lament, a poem written by the narrator as child, and the narrator’s
confident adult voice. All this suggests that the notion that the shishōsetsu
could adequately represent human experience is false. Instead, we can take
the story to mirror the common current view that identity is always shifting,
constructed as it is through languages and narratives. In Ri’s hands, that
construction is not passive; one must always recall, even revive, Korean-ness.
The politics of this view are not simple. Ri Kaisei rose to prominence in the
era just following normalization of relations with the ROK. Like Kim Tal-su
before him, Ri began his adult life affiliated with Sōren, but abandoned that
group, not to join Mindan or the South, but for a place in the Japanese literary
left. As such he travelled to the ROK, yet rallied with Japanese against the
suppression of leftist poet and playwright Kim Chi-ha (b. 1941) and refused to
take on South Korean citizenship.
For at least the next decade, the view that Zainichi literature should affirm
Korean identity remained ascendant. Ri’s contemporary Kin Kakuei (1938–
85), who was less leftist, less troubled by an affiliation with the ROK, and less
concerned with peppering his writing with Koreanisms, was recognized in
the 1990s by the Zainichi scholar Takeda Seiji (b. 1947), leading to a rise in
interest in his work, but for Kin Kakuei, it came too late; he had committed
suicide in 1985.
It was nearly two decades before another Zainichi writer was awarded the
Akutagawa Prize. This time, in 1989, the winning story was by an author
whose experience was worlds apart from Ri Kaisei’s. Like him, Yi Yang-ji
(1955–92) was a second-generation Zainichi Korean and decidedly concerned
with the history of Korean oppression, but she was a Japanese citizen, and
from a relatively comfortable economic background that enabled her to
travel to South Korea to study. In Yi Yang-ji’s day, politics had by no
means disappeared from the Zainichi experience. And yet more overtly

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 Postwar Zainichi writings: politics, language, and identity

political works, like poems of Osaka poet Chong Ch’u-wŏl (1944–2011) about
the Zainichi movement against the Japanese government’s requirement that
all Zainichi Koreans be fingerprinted, had receded into the background, and
those with a more existential flavor, like Yi’s, took the limelight.
Nearly all of Yi’s writing revolves around struggling Zainichi women, and
some of it, including the prize-winning Yuhi (Yuhi, 1988), is about women
who (like Yi herself) study in South Korea. In both Yuhi and Koku (Time,
1984), for example, the main characters are schooled in Korean language and
traditional Korean arts, and yet never fully accepted as Korean. Koku, in
particular, details the torment resulting from that rejection, of being post-
colonial, and – in addition – of being a woman. Kawamura Minato charac-
terizes that distress as a desire to escape; it can also be seen, particularly in
light of the shamanistic and artistic references throughout Yi’s work, as a
lament that acknowledges the inherent dignity of individual human
experience.
By the time Yu Miri (b. 1968) won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 and became
the most popular Zainichi writer of all time, the landscape had shifted
significantly. Although Yu has never hidden her Korean-ness and sometimes
writes about it overtly, her popularity and critical acclaim do not rely on her
being a representative of that minority. Instead, she is a full-fledged partici-
pant in debates of Japanese concern, foremost among them dysfunctional
families and violent young people. Her point that Zainichi families share a
good deal with Japanese families seems to have met with little opposition.
Yet, in the margins of the literary world, we still find Kim Sŏk-pŏm railing
against Ri Kaisei for deciding, at long last, to give up statelessness for South
Korean citizenship. In the same decade, Kaneshiro Kazuki’s (b. 1968) Gō (Go,
2000), a story of love between a tough Korean boy and a very middle-class
Japanese girl, was a commercial success as a book and then a film. Yang Sŏk-
il’s (b. 1936) hardboiled thrillers likewise found a broad readership. If Zainichi
Koreans still share the experience of social and political discrimination, in the
literary world their writing no longer addresses that common denominator.

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 80
Contemporary Japanese fiction
stephen snyder

By the late 1970s, after a period of relative economic turmoil due to the Oil
Shock of 1973, Japan returned to the rapid, export-driven growth that char-
acterized much of its postwar experience. It was the early stages of the period
known in retrospect as the Bubble Economy, marked by overheated secu-
rities and real estate markets, conspicuous overseas investments, and equally
conspicuous domestic consumption. The modest but increasing affluence
enjoyed in the 1960s, as the postwar recovery took hold, was replaced by a
sense of increasing economic ascendance, mirrored in foreign admiration for
Japanese products and management practices and fear of Japanese economic
might. The political opposition of the late 1960s was a fading memory or an
object of nostalgia, and the seeds of what would eventually be dubbed “Cool
Japan” were being sown domestically and readied for export. As the 1970s
came to a close, Japan was in the process of reimagining itself both in its own
eyes and in those of the world, and the literature of the period reflects a sense
of rupture that reshaped the cultural landscape.
A number of established writers from the postwar period continued to be
active well into the 1980s, providing a limited sense of continuity to the
literary scene. Abe Kōbō (1924–93) and Endō Shūsaku (1923–96) were inter-
nationally known figures regularly mentioned as Nobel Prize candidates,
and Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), who would go on to win the prize in 1994, had
made the transition from young literary insurgent to leading figure in the
bundan (literary establishment). Other postwar writers publishing major
works included Kaikō Takeshi (1930–89), Kōno Taeko (1926–2015), and Ōba
Minako (1930–2007).
In 1975, however, in what is often seen as a watershed in contemporary
literary history, Nakagami Kenji (1946–92) became the first writer born after
the Pacific War to win the Akutagawa Prize. Nakagami depicted the violence
and desperation as well as the lyrical beauty that haunted the burakumin
ghettos of his native Shingū (in Wakayama prefecture) in a series of powerful

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novels that included Misaki (The Cape, 1976, trans. 1999), Karekinada (The
Straits of Kareki, 1977), and Sennen no yuraku (A Thousand Years of Pleasure,
1982). Nakagami’s morally engaged themes and powerful prose were
admired across the political spectrum. Ōe Kenzaburō praised his deep suspi-
cion of the established order and central authority, while a relatively con-
servative critic such as Etō Jun (1932–99) recognized the music of Nakagami’s
language and felt that he created fictions that “dispense with modernity and
revive a space of essential Japanese-ness lost to tales of narrative
development.”1 Nakagami was among the most accomplished writers of his
generation, but his career, and perhaps the impulse his fiction represented,
was cut short by his death from liver cancer in 1992.
The same critics who admired Nakagami began to identify a “crisis in Pure
Literature” (junbungaku no kiki) beginning at about this same time. Etō, for
example, dismissed the Akutagawa Prize winner for 1976, Murakami Ryū’s
(b. 1952) Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū (Almost Transparent Blue, 1976, trans.
1977) as “nonsense.” He feels that Murakami’s graphic account of his experi-
ences with drugs and sex in the neighborhoods surrounding the US air force
bases to the west of Tokyo was an artifact of a short-lived subculture rather
than an attempt to “express the culture as a whole.”2 His comments are
echoed somewhat later in Ōe’s characterization of the works of the new
generation of writers as “mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of
Tokyo.”3 Despite their political differences, Etō and Ōe shared an assumption
that “serious” or “pure” literature should seek to represent and engage the
national culture, and that this new fiction had other ambitions – or no
ambitions at all. By 1990, Ōe worried that serious literature and a literary
readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has
emerged over the last several years. This strange new phenomenon is largely
an economic one, reflected in the fact that each of the novels of certain young
writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto sell several hundred
thousand copies.
The “decline in serious literature” reflects the fact that distinctions
between junbungaku and taishū bungaku (mass fiction) were becoming
increasingly irrelevant. By this period traditional taishū bungaku had largely

1
Quoted in Alan Tansman, “History, Repetition, and Freedom in the Narratives of
Nakagami Kenji,” Journal of Japanese Studies 24, no. 2 (1988): 254.
2
Etō Jun, “Murakami Ryū, Akutagawa-shō jushō no nansensu,” Sandei Mainichi, July 25,
1976, 136–8.
3
Ōe Kenzaburō, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures
(Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995), 121–2.

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 stephen snyder

evolved into its generic components – science fiction, mystery, popular

historical fiction, romance – and these were being reconfigured in an emer-
ging category that came to be called entāteinmento bungaku (entertainment
literature). But of equal importance is the fact that emerging writers increas-
ingly ignored the boundaries between serious and popular fiction, often
moving freely from junbungaku to popular genres or combining elements
of various genres in a single fiction. After winning the junbungaku-associated
Akutagawa Prize for Almost Transparent Blue, Murakami Ryū, for example,
published Koinrokkā beibı¯zu (Coin Locker Babies, 1980, trans. 1995), a novel
that incorporates conventions from mystery, science fiction, and horror
genres. Similarly, Murakami Haruki’s (b. 1949) Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo
wandārando (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1985, trans.
1991) is a hybrid of detective fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. These
practices became widespread in succeeding generations, and while the dis-
tinction between junbungaku and popular fiction remains a topic of debate,
the distinction remains relevant mostly in the shelving practices of book-
stores, in literary prizes, and in high-culture literary journals that have
lingering investments in the identification with serious literature.
In singling out for criticism the sales of books by Murakami Haruki and
Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964), Ōe identified the changing aesthetic and eco-
nomic factors that have driven developments in fiction since 1980. After
conspicuous debuts, Murakami and Yoshimoto, along with other writers
such as Murakami Ryū, Yamada Eimi (b. 1959), and Shimada Masahiko (b.
1961), built careers that transcended traditional literary categories and inau-
gurated the notion of the bungaku aidoru (literary idol) that has shaped
publishing practices and readership in the last three decades.
Murakami Haruki has been the most influential figure of his generation as
well as Japan’s best-selling writer at home and abroad. His career has spanned
various genres and media and has set new standards for the commodification
of literary works. It began with a series of novels – Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the
Wind Sing, 1979), 1973-nen no pinbōru (Pinball 1973, 1980) and Hitsuji o meguru
bōken (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982) – in which he refined his detached, ironic
narrative style and the fantastic plot elements that characterize his later
fiction. After Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood, 1987, trans. 2000), an
atypically realistic romance, established Murakami’s credentials as a best-
selling writer, he has produced a prodigious stream of major novels (Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle, 1995, trans. 1997; Kafka on the Shore, 2002, trans. 2005; 1Q84, 2009,
trans. 2011), minor novels (South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1992, trans. 2000;
Sputnik Sweetheart, 1999, trans. 2001; After Dark, 2004, trans. 2007), non-fiction

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(Underground, 1997–8, trans. 2000; What I Talk About When I Talk about
Running, 2007, trans. 2008), short story collections (often in collaboration
with noted illustrators), and various ephemera, not to mention more than
fifty volumes of American fiction in Japanese translation. Murakami’s career
is run as a successful industry, and it has become a (largely inimitable) model
for literary celebrity in Japan. His fiction, which captures a sense of urban
disaffection and anxiety, has resonated with a generation of readers around
the world, and Murakami’s spare prose and cool detachment have inspired
numerous followers and imitators.
The early careers of Yoshimoto Banana and Yamada Eimi were nearly as
influential as Murakami’s in establishing patterns of literary celebrity.
Yoshimoto’s debut novel Kitchin (Kitchen, 1987, trans. 1993) laid out many
of the relatively serious themes that she has continued to examine through-
out her career – love, sexual ambiguity, and the fragility of life – but the light,
shōjo-like tone of her work made her an instant and enduring success with a
new generation of readers while also challenging traditional notions of
literary gravity.
Yamada’s work in the early years of her career could not have been more
different from Yoshimoto’s, dealing as it did with sadomasochistic relation-
ships between Japanese women and African-American men in works such as
Beddo taimu aizu (Bedtime Eyes, 1985, trans. 2006) and Torasshu (Trash, 1991,
trans. 1995). But she shared with Yoshimoto, as well as with Murakami
Haruki and Murakami Ryū, a sensational literary debut and meteoric rise
to celebrity that has redefined the shape of the publishing industry and
creative patterns themselves.
The categorization of writers into generations, schools, and movements,
which was once among the central functions of Japanese criticism, became
increasingly difficult as distinctions between high and popular literature
dissolved and writers began to move freely among genres and among
different media. Strands of development can be traced, however, emanating
from the dominant literary figures of the early years of this period.
Murakami Haruki’s influence is most pronounced, and can be felt in a
generation of writers who cast their work in versions of his spare prose, and
share his attitudes toward the importance of storytelling and his penchant for
talking animals and the creation of fantasy worlds bearing little resemblance
to contemporary Japan. While imitation is not the goal of these writers, many
of them freely admit Murakami’s influence.
Ogawa Yōko (b. 1962) won the Akutagawa Prize for Ninshin karendā
(Pregnancy Diary, 1991, trans. 2008) in 1991. Like many of her subsequent

763
 stephen snyder

works, it is told in the voice of an emotionally detached young woman who is

related in spirit to Murakami’s signature first-person narrator. Ogawa’s
narrative style, like Murakami’s, also juxtaposes detailed descriptions of
everyday life – food or domestic activity – with disturbing and fantastic
plot elements. Ogawa has said that her fiction is set not in Japan but in worlds
of her own creating.
The works of Kawakami Hiromi (b. 1958) range from science fiction to
romance, but the tendency toward fantasy is representative of a dominant
trend in Japanese fiction after Murakami. The protagonist of her Akutagawa
Prize winning Hebi o fumu (Tread on a Snake, 1996) destroys a talking snake,
only to have it return as a middle-aged woman. In “Hokusai” (2002), the
narrator meets a man at the beach who turns out to be the octopus in a
celebrated erotic woodblock print.
Other writers who have been influenced by Murakami Haruki include:
Yoshida Shūichi (b. 1968), whose Pāku raifu (Park Life, 2002), with its under-
stated prose style and disaffected protagonists, typifies twenty-first-century
urban Japanese fiction; Ekuni Kaori (b. 1964), who offers quirky depictions of
everyday life and relationships in works such as Tokyo Tawā (Tokyo Tower,
2001) and Kira kira hikaru (Twinkle, Twinkle, 1992, trans. 2003); and Ishii Shinji
(b. 1966), who has developed the fantasy strain in Japanese literature in fable-
like novels such as Puranetariumu no futago (The Planetarium Twins, 2003)
and Mizuumi (The Lake, 2007).
The influence of Murakami Ryū can be felt in a group of writers whose
themes and imagery borrow from the grittiness and intensity of his work.
Murakami Ryū has experimented with science fiction and fantasy in works
such as Coin Locker Babies and Gofun go no sekai (The World Five Minutes
Later, 1994) and with a hybrid mystery-horror genre in In za miso sūpu (In the
Miso Soup, 1997, trans. 2003) and Piashingu (Piercing, 1994, trans. 2007).
Murakami Ryū is representative as well of a growing tendency for writers
to draw their influences from non-literary media and to work across media
and occupational categories. His influences include manga, anime, and video
games, and he has worked as television host, political and economic com-
mentator, and film director, while continuing to produce fiction at a rapid
pace. More recent novels have dealt with unsettling aspects of contemporary
Japanese culture such as hikikomori in Kyōseichū (Parasites, 2000) and enjo-kōsai
(“compensated dating”) in Rabu & poppu (Love and Pop, 1996).
Murakami Ryū’s influence on post-Bubble Entertainment Literature can
be felt in the work of writers such as Kirino Natsuo (b. 1951), Kanehara Hitomi
(b. 1983), and Ishida Ira (b. 1960) who focus on the violence and antisocial

764
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behavior at the margins of Japanese society, often inspired by news accounts

of sensational crimes or disturbing social trends. Kirino’s OUT (1997, trans.
2003) deals with a catalog of social ills, including the marginalization of
women’s work, spousal abuse, and teenage prostitution, while Ishida’s
Ikebukuro Uesuto gēto pāku (Ikebukuro Westgate Park, 1997) depicts a group
of dropouts who have little to do but loiter in the park of the title. The
popularity of both works was enhanced, as is increasingly common, by film
and television adaptations, and in Ishida’s case a manga version as well. In
2003, at twenty-one years of age, Kanehara became the youngest writer
(along with co-recipient Wataya Risa, b. 1984) to win the Akutagawa Prize.
Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings, 2004, trans. 2005), which depicts the
experiences of a young woman obsessed with piercings and violent sex,
owes much to Murakami Ryū’s early fiction in tone and content as well as
to the early works of Yamada Eimi.
The influence of the global postmodern can be felt in Japanese fiction
beginning with the work of Shimada Masahiko. His Higan sensei (Master from
across the Way, 1992), for example, is a broad and inventive parody of
Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, a central work of the modern canon. Other writers
sharing Shimada’s taste for pastiche, parody, and stylistic experimentation
include Takahashi Gen’ichirō (b. 1951), Abe Kazushige (b. 1968), Machida Kō
(b. 1962), Matsuura Rieko (b. 1958), and Shōno Yoriko (b. 1956). Matsuura’s
Ura bājon (Opposite Version, 2000) is an extended experiment in metafictional
techniques while Shōno’s Taimusurippu konbināto (Time Warp Complex,
1994), for which she won the Akutagawa Prize, is a dreamlike trip through
post-Bubble Tokyo with typical displays of linguistic and imagistic virtuosity.
Nakagami Kenji depicted the largely hidden world of the burakumin
ghetto at the beginning of this period, but since the 1980s literature by and
about disenfranchised groups in Japan has increasingly received critical
attention and gained popularity among readers. Novels and stories reflecting
the politics of identity and the problems of discrimination have become a
central part of the literary discourse.
Though it has a longer history, literature by Zainichi (resident) Korean
writers began to enter the mainstream only in the 1970s, as Zainichi writers
received recognition in the bundan for their depictions of outsider-hood in
Japanese society. Ri Kaisei (b. 1935) won the Akutagawa Prize in 1972 for
“Kinuta o utsu onna” (Woman Who Beats the Fulling Block, 1972), inaugu-
rating a list of resident Koreans who have won the prize, including Yi Yangji
(1955–92) (Yuhi, 1988), Yu Miri (b. 1968) (Kazoku shinema, 1996), and Gengetsu
(b. 1965) (Kage no sumika, 1999). In 2008, the Chinese writer Yang Yi (b. 1964)

765
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became the first non-native speaker of Japanese to win the prize for Toki ga
nijimu asa (A Morning When Time Bleeds), a depiction of the suffering of
young people participating in China’s pro-democracy movement of the late
1980s. Earlier, the American-born Levy Hideo (b. 1950) had created a literary
sensation when Seijōki no kikoenai heya (The Room where the Star-Spangled
Banner Cannot Be Heard, 1992, trans. 2011) won the Noma Literary Prize for
New Writers.
Lesbian and gay literature also became more visible after 1980, as poet and
novelist Takahashi Mutsuo (b. 1937) emerged as a spokesman for gay issues in
Japanese society. Hiruma Hisao’s (b. 1960) Yes, Yes, Yes (1990) was perhaps the
first widely read novel in Japan to offer a positive portrayal of gay life, while
Nakayama Kaho’s (b. 1960) Shiroi bara no fuchi made (The Depths of White
Roses, 2001) provided a frank depiction of a lesbian relationship.
An increasingly transnational strain in Japanese fiction can be seen in the
works of writers such as Tawada Yōko (b. 1960), who has lived in Germany
for much of her adult life and publishes in both German and Japanese. The
influence of Kafka and Murakami Haruki are evident in works such as Inu
mukoiri (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 1993, trans. 1998), which won the
Akutagawa Prize in 1993, and a recent multigenerational account of talking
polar bears, Yuki no renshūsei (The Trainee of Snow, 2011). Mizumura Minae
(b. 1951), on the other hand, returned to Japan after being raised and educated
in the United States. She launched her career by writing a continuation of
Natsume Sōseki’s unfinished novel Meian (Zoku Meian, 1990). In that auda-
cious literary debut and in works such as the bilingual Watakushi shōsetsu from
left to right (An I Novel from Left to Right, 1995) and her Wuthering Heights-
inspired Honkaku shōsetsu (A True Novel, 2002, trans. 2013), Mizumura
demonstrates her deep knowledge of Japanese literary tradition as it con-
fronts a complex historical and cultural landscape and suggests that a more
literarily sophisticated readership still exists in the age of commercialization.
Her recent Haha no isan (Inheritance from My Mother, 2012) deals with the
difficulty of providing care for an aging mother, suggesting the sorts of
themes Japanese fiction will confront in the coming years.
Much as Ōe lamented the decline of serious literature and increasing
commercialization in the 1990s, a decade later the literary world was dis-
turbed to find that half of the ten best-selling books for 2007 were novels that
had originated as keitai shōsetsu (cellphone novels). Cellphone novels, gen-
erally dark romances written in short, small-screen-friendly sentences and
delivered to phones in brief installments, are written most often by young
women who carefully protect their identities with pen-names such as Mika or

766
 Contemporary Japanese fiction

Rin. Mika’s Koizora (Love Sky, 2005) was viewed more than 12 million times
on line and sold more than 2 million copies in print. Sales of books – both
serious and popular – have on the other hand declined in recent years. Fiction
in print form increasingly competes – often with limited success – for
attention not only with manga and cellphone novels but with computer
games, hypertext fictions, and other forms of narrative entertainment, and
Japanese publishers, like their counterparts around the world, struggle to
adapt to the new environment. Yet at the same time many writers continue
to publish at a prodigious pace, and long, ambitious novels, such as Abe
Kazushige’s Shinsemia (Sinsemilla, 2003), a Faulkneresque evocation of small-
town Japan, and Yu Miri’s Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August, 2004), a
fictionalization of the life of Yu’s grandfather, a noted marathon runner,
continue to find readers. And at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first
century, Murakami Haruki’s three-volume, 1,500-page 1Q84 (2009–10, trans.
2011), a love story played out across parallel universes, produced a domestic –
and ultimately an international – publishing sensation of unprecedented
proportions. While the legacy of the Murakami generation remains to be
determined, it seems clear that Japanese literature continues to find readers
and engage with the culture it represents.

767
 Bibliography of English secondary sources
and translations

The following are recommended readings of translations and secondary sources in English
arranged according to the structure of this book. All English-language sources and works
cited in the individual chapters appear here. In a number of cases entries appear in more
than one section. In the modern section, limitations on space precluded a comprehensive
listing of translations of modern novels.

General readings from the ancient to the Edo period

Bialock, David T. Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority
from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007.
Brazell, Karen, ed. Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998.
Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1961.
Carter, Steven. Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991.
Friday, Karl, ed. Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012.
Katō, Shūichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 1, The First Thousand Years. Trans. David
Chibbett. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979.
Kawamoto, Kōji. Poetics of Japanese Verse. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2000.
Keene, Donald, ed. Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-
Nineteenth Century. New York: Grove Press, 1955.
Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Kornicki, Peter. The Book in Japan. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998.
McCullough, Helen, ed. Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990.
Miner, Earl, ed. Principles of Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1985.
Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert Morrell. Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese
Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

768
 Bibliography

Morris, Mark. “Waka and Form, Waka and History.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46,
no. 2 (Dec. 1986): 551–610.
Piggott, Joan R. et al., ed. Dictionnaire des sources du Japon classique/Dictionary of Sources of
Classical Japan. Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises. Paris: Collège
de France, Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises, 2006.
Plutschow, Herbert Eugen. Chaos and Cosmos: Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese
Literature. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990.
Pollack, David. The Fracture of Meaning: Japan’s Synthesis of China from the Eighth through the
Eighteenth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Sakaki, Atsuko. Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008.
Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
ed. Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007.
Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012.
Shirane, Haruo, and Tomi Suzuki, ed. Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity,
and Japanese Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Shirane, Haruo et al., eds. Sekai e hiraku waka: gengo, kyōdōtai, jendā / Waka Opening Up to
the World: Language, Community, and Gender. Tokyo: Benseisha, 2012.
Wixted, Timothy. A Handbook to Classical Japanese. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East
Asia Program, 2006.

The ancient period (beginnings to 794)

General readings
Brown, Delmer, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. I, Ancient Japan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Como, Michael. Weaving and Binding: Female Shamans and Immigrant Gods in Nara Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.
Cranston, Edwin. Waka Anthology. Vol. 1, The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993.
Duthie, Torquil. Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2014.
Ebersole, Gary L. Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Farris, William Wayne. Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures: Issues in the Historical Archaeology
of Ancient Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.
Frydman, Joshua. “Uta Mokkan: A History of Early Japanese Poetry through Inscription.”
Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2014.
Inoue, Nobutaka, ed. Shinto: A Short History. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 1, The Archaic and Ancient Ages. Ed.
Earl Miner, trans. Aileen Gatten and Nicholas Teele. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
Lurie, David B. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

769
 Bibliography

Ooms, Herman. Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.
Piggott, Joan R. The Emergence of Japanese Kingship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1997.

Myth and history in the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and related

works
Aston, W.G., trans. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Rutland,
VT and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. (Original 1896, 2 vols.)
Bender, Ross. “Performative Loci of the Imperial Edicts in Nara Japan, 749–70.” Oral
Tradition 24, no. 1 (2009): 249–68.
Bentley, John R. Historiographical Trends in Early Japan. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
2002.
The Authenticity of Sendai Kuji Hongi: A New Examination of Texts, with a Translation and
Commentary. Brill Japanese Studies Library 25. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006.
Bock, Felicia Gressitt, trans. Engi-Shiki: Procedures of the Engi Era. 2 vols. Tokyo: Sophia
University, 1970–2.
Borgen, Robert, and Marian Ury. “Readable Japanese Mythology: Selections from
Nihon shoki and Kojiki.” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 24, no. 1
(1990): 61–97.
Burns, Susan L. Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern
Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Como, Michael. Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Heldt, Gustav. The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2014.
Isomae, Jun’ichi, Japanese Mythology: Hermeneutics on Scripture. Oakville, CT: Equinox,
2009.
Nakamura, Kyoko Motomochi, trans. Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist
Tradition: The Nihon Ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1973.
Philippi, Donald. Kojiki. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968.
Norito: A Translation of the Ancient Japanese Ritual Prayers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990. (Reprint of 1959 edition published by Kokugakuin
University.)
Sakamoto, Tarō. The Six National Histories of Japan. Trans. John S. Brownlee. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1991. (Translation of Rikkokushi, Yoshikawa
kōbunkan, 1970.)
Sansom, George B. “The Imperial Edicts in the Shoku Nihongi.” Transactions of the Asiatic
Society of Japan 2, no. 1 (1924): 5–40.
Tanabe, George, ed. Religions of Japan in Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999.
Watson, Burton. Record of Miraculous Events in Japan: The Nihon ryōiki. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013.

770
 Bibliography

Songs of the Records and Chronicles

Duthie, Torquil. “Poetry and Kingship in Ancient Japan.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia
University, 2005.
Morris, Mark. “Japanese Folksong and Song in Early Japan: An Introduction.” Ph.D. diss.,
Harvard University, 1976.

Fudoki gazetteers
Aoki, Michiko Y. Records of Wind and Earth: A Translation of Fudoki with Introduction and
Commentaries. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1997.
Carlqvist, Anders. “The Land-Pulling Myth and Some Aspects of Historic Reality.”
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 185–222.
Funke, Mark C. “Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki.” Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 1 (1994): 1–29.
Inoue, Tatsuo. “The Hitachi Fudoki and the Fujiwara.” Trans. Michiko Aoki. In Joan
Piggott, ed., Capital and Countryside in Japan, 300–1180. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
East Asia Program, 2006.
Palmer, Edwina. “Calming the Killing Kami: The Supernatural, Nature and Culture in
Fudoki.” Nichibunken Japan Review 13 (2001): 3–31.
Harima Fudoki: A Record of Ancient Japan Reinterpreted. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2015.

Man’yōshū
Collins, Kevin. “Integrating Lament and Ritual Pacification in the Man’yōshū Banka
Sequence for Tenji Tennō.” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 34, no. 1
(April, 2000): 44–77.
Commons, Anne. Hitomaro: Poet as God. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2009.
Doe, Paula. A Warbler’s Song in the Dusk: The Life and Work of Ōtomo Yakamochi (718–85).
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Duthie, Torquil. Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan. Leiden: E.J. Brill,
2014.
Horton, H. Mack. Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese Mission to
Silla in 736–737. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.
Levy, Ian Hideo, trans. The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man’yōshū, Japan’s
Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981.
Hitomaro and the Birth of Japanese Lyricism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984.
McCullough, Helen Craig. Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry,
with “Tosa Nikki” and “Shinsen Waka.” Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Miller, Roy Andrew. “The Footprints of the Buddha”: An Eighth-Century Old Japanese Poetic
Sequence. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1975.
“The Lost Poetic Sequence of the Priest Manzei.” Monumenta Nipponica 36, no. 2 (1981):
133–72.
“Yamanoe Okura, a Korean Poet in Eighth-Century Japan.” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 104, no. 4 (1984): 703–26.

771
 Bibliography

Ono, Hiroshi. “An Outline of Research on the Influence of Chinese Literature in the
Man’yōshū.” Trans. Rolf W. Giebel. Acta Asiatica 77 (1999): 13–29.
Pierson, Jan Lodewijk, trans. The Manyōśū. 21 vols. (Vol. 5 with K. Florenz [1938].) Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1929–64.
Robinson, Jeremy R. “The Tsukushi Man’yōshū Poets and the Invention of Japanese
Poetry.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2004.
Sieffert, René, trans. Man’yōshū. 5 vols. Paris: UNESCO, 1997–2003.
The Man’yōshū: The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai Translation of One Thousand Poems.
Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1940; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.
Vovin, Alexander, trans. Man’yōshū: A New English Translation Containing the Original Text,
Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary. Vols. 5, 14, 15, 20 to date.
Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2009, 2011 (vols. 15, 5); Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012, 2013 (vols.
14, 20).

Anthologization and Sino-Japanese literature: Kaifūsō and

the Three Imperial Anthologies
Denecke, Wiebke. “Chinese Antiquity and Court Spectacle in Early Kanshi.” Journal of
Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 97–122.
“Writing History in the Face of the Other: Early Japanese Anthologies and the Beginnings
of Literature.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 76 (2004): 71–114.
“The Power of Syntopism: Chinese Poetic Place Names on the Map of Early Japanese
Poetry.” Asia Major 26, no. 2 (2013): 33–57.
Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Heldt, Gustav. The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell East Asia Series, 2008.
Rabinovitch, Judith N., and Timothy R. Bradstock. Dance of the Butterflies: Chinese Poetry
from the Japanese Court Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2005.
Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1975.
Webb, Jason. “In Good Order: Poetry, Reception, and Authority in the Nara and Early
Heian Courts.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005.

The Heian period (794–1185)

General readings
Adolphson, Mikael, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, eds. Heian Japan, Centers and
Peripheries. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Brower, Robert. “Waka.” In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Vol. 8, 201–17. Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1983.
Brower, Robert, and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1961.
Cavanaugh, Carole. “Text and Textile: Unweaving the Female Subject in Heian Writing.”
Positions 4, no. 3 (1996): 595–636.

772
 Bibliography

Cranston, Edwin. “Heian Literature.” In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Vol. 5, 28–41.

Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983.
LaMarre, Thomas. Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
McCullough, Helen, ed. Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990.
Okada, Richard. Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in “The Tale of Genji”
and Other Mid-Heian Texts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Sarra, Edith. Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s
Memoirs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Shively, Donald, and William McCullough, eds. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 2,
Heian Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Vernon, Victoria. “Revising the Legacy.” In Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will, and Social
Constraint in Fiction by Modern Japanese Women, 17–32. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian
Studies, University of California, Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies, 1988.
Yoda, Tomiko. Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese
Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Sugawara no Michizane, a Heian literatus and statesman

Borgen, Robert. Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court. 2nd edn. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994.
Rabinovitch, Judith N., and Timothy R. Bradstock. Dance of the Butterflies: Chinese Poetry
from the Japanese Court Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program,
2005.
Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese. Vol. 1, Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese
Writers of the Early Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Kokinshū and Heian court poetry

Brannen, Noah S. “The Kinkafu Collection of Ancient Japanese Songs.” Monumenta
Nipponica 23, nos. 3–4 (1968): 229–73, 275–320.
Brower, Robert, and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1961.
Bundy, Rose. “Court Women in Poetry Contests: The Tentoku Yonen Dairi Utaawase
(Poetry Contest Held at Court in 960).” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 33 (2007): 33–57.
Ceadel, E.B. “The Ōi River Poems and Preface.” Asia Major 3, no. 1 (1953): 65–106.
Cranston, Edwin, trans. A Waka Anthology: Grasses of Remembrance. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2006.
Harries, Phillip. “Personal Poetry Collections: Their Origin and Development through the
Heian Period.” Monumenta Nipponica 35, no. 3 (1980): 299–317.
Heldt, Gustav. “Between Followers and Friends: Male Homosocial Desire in Heian Court
Poetry.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 33 (2007): 1–32.
The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East
Asia Series, 2008.

773
 Bibliography

Ito, Setsuko. An Anthology of Traditional Japanese Poetry Competitions: Uta-awase (913–1815).

Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1991.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. “Association and Progression: Principles of Integration in Anthologies
and Sequences of Japanese Court Poetry, A.D. 900–1350.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 21 (1958): 67–127.
LaCure, Jon. Rhetorical Devices of the Kokinshū: A Structural Analysis of Japanese Waka Poetry.
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.
LaMarre, Thomas. Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
McCullough, Helen Craig. Brocade by Night: Kokin Wakashū and the Court Style in Classical
Japanese Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
trans. Kokin wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, with Tosa nikki and
Shinsen waka. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Miller, Stephen D. The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the
Heian Period. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2013.
Rodd, Laurel Rasplica, and Mary Catherine Henkenius, trans. Kokinshū: A Collection of
Poems Ancient and Modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Sorensen, Joseph T. Optical Allusions: Screens, Painting, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800–
1200). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012.
Teele, Nicholas. “Rules for Poetic Elegance: Fujiwara no Kintō’s Shinsen Zuinō & Waka
Kuhon.” Monumenta Nipponica 31, no. 2 (1976): 145–64.

Heian court tales (combining early Heian court tales and late
courtly romance)
Bowring, Richard. “The Ise monogatari: A Short Cultural History.” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 52, no. 2 (1992): 410–80.
Cahill, Suzanne E. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in
Medieval China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Cranston, Edwin A. “Atemiya. A Translation for the Utsubo monogatari.” Monumenta
Nipponica 24, no. 3 (1969): 289–314.
D’Etcheverry, Charo B. Love after The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the Shining Prince.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.
Dutcher, David Pearsall, trans. “Sagoromo.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2006.
Hochstedler, Carol. The Tale of Nezame: Part Three of Yowa no Nezame Monogatari. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University East Asia Papers 22, 1979.
Hu, Xiu-min. “Princesses Who Yearn for the Moon: Murasaki, Oigimi, and Ukifune as
Reflections of Kaguyahime.” B.C. Asian Review 11 (1997/8): 1–31.
Keene, Donald, trans. “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.” Monumenta Nipponica 11, no. 4
(1956): 329–55.
Khan, Robert Omar. “‘Ariake no Wakare’: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in a Late 12th
Century Monogatari (Japan).” Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1998.

774
 Bibliography

“Genealogy and Cross-gendering in Le Roman de Silence and Ariake no Wakare [Parting at

Dawn].” Arthuriana: The Journal of Arthurian Studies 12, no. 1 (2002): 76–84.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 3, The High Middle Ages. Trans. Aileen
Gatten and Mark Harbison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Lammers, Wayne P. “The Succession (Kuniyuzuri): A Translation from Utsuho
Monogatari.” Monumenta Nipponica 37, no. 2 (1982): 139–78.
The Tale of Matsura: Fujiwara Teika’s Experiment in Fiction. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for
Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992.
Marra, Michele, trans. “Mumyōzōshi.” (Parts 1–3). Monumenta Nipponica 39, nos. 2–4 (1984).
The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991.
Mather, Richard B., trans. Shih-shuo Hsin-yü, A New Account of Tales of the World, by Liu I-
ch’ing with Commentary by Liu Chün. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1976.
Mauclaire, Simone. Du conte au roman: un cendrillon japonais du Xe siècle: l’Ochikubo
monogatari. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1984.
Mostow, Joshua S. At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and
Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2004.
Mostow, Joshua S., and Royall Tyler, trans. The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010.
Mueller, Marie Jaqueline. “The Nature and Origins of Realism in ‘Utsubo Monogatari.’”
Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982.
Pflugfelder, Gregory M. “Strange Fates: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Torikaebaya
Monogatari.” Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 3 (1992): 347–368.
Piggott, Joan, et al. Dictionary of Sources of Classical Japan. Paris: Collège de France, Institut
des Hautes Études Japonaises, 2006.
Richard, Kenneth L. “Developments in Late Heian Prose Fiction: The Tale of Nezame.”
Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1973.
“Aspects of the Late Heian Monogatari: Fantasy in a Literature in Transition.” In
Katsuhiko Takeda, ed., Essays on Japanese Literature, 41–53. Tokyo: Waseda
University Press, 1977.
Sieffert, René. “Le conte du coupeur de bambous.” Bulletin de la Maison Franco-Japonaise 2
(1952): 123–99.
trans. D’une lectrice du Genji: Mumyō zōshi. Paris: Publications orientalistes de France,
1994.
Tahara, Mildred, trans. Tales of Yamato: A Tenth-Century Poem-Tale. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1980.
Tyler, Royall. The Disaster of the Third Princess: Essays on The Tale of Genji. Canberra:
Australia National University E Press, 2009.
Uraki, Ziro, trans. The Tale of the Cavern (Utsuho Monogatari). Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin,
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Videen, Susan Downing. Tales of Heichū. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center,
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Willig, Rosette F., trans. The Changelings [Torikaebaya monogatari]: A Classical Japanese Court
Tale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Genji monogatari and its reception

Bargen, Doris G. A Woman’s Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997.
Bowring, Richard. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge:
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Caddeau, Patrick. Appraising Genji: Literary Criticism and Cultural Anxiety in the Age of the
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D’Etcheverry, Charo. Love after The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the Shining Prince.
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Field, Norma. The Splendor of Longing in The Tale of Genji. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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Goff, Janet. Noh Drama and the Tale of Genji: The Art of Allusion in Fifteen Classical Noh Plays.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Harper, Thomas, and Haruo Shirane, eds. Reading The Tale of Genji: Sources from the First
Millennium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
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York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1993.
McMullen, James. Idealism, Protest, and The Tale of Genji: The Confucianism of Kumazawa
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Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. Oxford: Oxford
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Okada, H. Richard. Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji
and Other Mid-Heian Texts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
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Pekarik, Andrew, ed. Ukifune: Love in The Tale of Genji. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982.
Rowley, G.G. Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese
Studies, University of Michigan, 2000.
Seidensticker, Edward, trans. The Tale of Genji. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Shirane, Haruo. The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1987.
ed. Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production. New York:
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Waley, Arthur, trans. The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
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Washburn, Dennis, trans. The Tale of Genji. New York: Norton, 2015.

Premodern commentary on the classical literary canon

Bowring, Richard. “The Ise monogatari: A Short Cultural History.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
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Cook, Lewis. “Genre Trouble: Medieval Commentaries and Canonization of The Tale of
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
Mostow, Joshua S. Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin isshu in Word and Image. Honolulu:
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The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

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Morris, Mark. “Sei Shōnagon’s Poetic Catalogues.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 40,
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Heian literary diaries: from Tosa nikki to Sarashina nikki

Arntzen, Sonja, trans. Kagerō Diary: A Woman’s Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century
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The Heian Academy: literati culture from Minamoto no

Shitagō to Ōe no Masafusa
Bailey, Don Clifford. “Early Japanese Lexicography.” Monumenta Nipponica 16, no. 1/2
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Bock, Felicia G. Classical Learning and Taoist Practices in Early Japan: With a Translation of
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Borgen, Robert. Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court. Honolulu: University of
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“Ōe no Masafusa and the Spirit of Michizane.” Monumenta Nipponica 50, no. 3 (1995):
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“Heian Love: Domestic and Imported.” Nihon Kanbungaku kenkyū 4 (2009): 257–86.
Denecke, Wiebke. “Chinese Antiquity and Court Spectacle in Early Kanshi.” Journal of
Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 97–122.
“‘Topic Poetry Is All Ours’: Poetic Composition on Chinese Lines in Early Heian
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Guest, Jennifer. “Primers, Commentaries, and Kanbun Literacy in Japanese Literary
Culture, 950–1250 CE.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2013.
Horton, H. Mack. “Japanese Spirit and Chinese Learning: Scribes and Storytellers in
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Kamens, Edward. “Terrains of Text in Mid-Heian Court Culture.” In Mikael Adolphson,
Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, eds., Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries,
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Kurozumi, Makoto. “Kangaku: Writing and Institutional Authority.” In Haruo Shirane
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the Japanese Court Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2005.
Shibayama, Saeko. “Ōe no Masafusa and the Convergence of the ‘Ways’: The Twilight of
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Smits, Ivo. The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca.
1050–1150. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995.
“An Early Anthropologist? Ōe no Masafusa’s A Record of Fox Spirits.” In P.F. Kornicki
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“The Way of the Literati: Chinese Learning and Literary Practice in Mid-Heian Japan.”
In Mikael Adolphson, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, eds., Heian Japan,
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Steininger, Brian. “Poetic Ministers: Literacy and Bureaucracy in the Tenth-Century State
Academy.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010.
Ury, Marian. “The Ōe Conversations.” Monumenta Nipponica 48, no. 3 (1993): 359–80.
“Chinese Learning and Intellectual Life.” In Donald H. Shively and William H.
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Wang, Zhenping. Ambassadors from the Island of Immortals: China–Japan Relations in the Han-
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Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1975–6.
Wetzler, Peter. “Yoshishige no Yasutane: Lineage, Learning, Office, and Amida’s Pure
Land.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1977.

Heian canons of Chinese poetry: Wakan rōeishū and Bai Juyi

Denecke, Wiebke. “‘Topic Poetry Is All Ours’ – Poetic Composition on Chinese Lines in
Early Heian Japan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 67, no. 1 (2007): 1–49.
Hinton, David, trans. The Selected Poems of Po Chü-i. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Levy, Howard S. Po Chü-i and the Japanese Response. Yokohama: K–L Publications, 1984.
Po Chü-i. Selected Poems. Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press,
2000.
Rimer, J. Thomas, and Jonathan Chaves, eds. and trans. Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing:
The Wakan Rōeishū. With Contributions by Jin’ichi Konishi, Stephen Addiss, and Ann
Yonemura. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Smits, Ivo. “Song as Cultural History: Reading Wakan rōeishū (Texts).” Monumenta
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“Song as Cultural History: Reading Wakan rōeishū (Interpretations).” Monumenta
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Smits, Ivo. “The Way of the Literati: Chinese Learning and Literary Practice in Mid-Heian
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Vernacular histories: Eiga monogatari, Ōkagami,

Gukanshō
Bialock, David T. Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority
from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007.
Brown, Delmer, and Ichirō Ishida. The Future and the Past: A Translation and Study of the
Gukanshō, an Interpretative History of Japan Written in 1219. Berkeley: University of
California, 1979.
Brownlee, J.S. Political Thought in Japanese Historical Writing: From Kojiki (712) to Tokushi
Yoron (1712). Waterloo, Ont.: Laurier, 1991.
Hurst, Cameron. “Michinaga’s Maladies. A Medical Report on Fujiwara no Michinaga.”
Monumenta Nipponica 34, no. 1 (1979): 101–12.
McCullough, Helen. Okagami, the Great Mirror: Fujiwara Michinaga (966–1027) and His
Times: A Study and Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
McCullough, Helen, and William McCullough, trans. A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of
Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period. 2 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1980.
Nickerson, Peter. “The Meaning of Matrilocality. Kinship, Property, and Politics in Mid-
Heian.” Monumenta Nipponica 48, no. 4 (1993): 429–67.
Sorensen, Joseph T. “The Politics of Screen Poetry: Michinaga, Sanesuke, and the Court
Entrance of Shōshi.” Journal of Japanese Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 85–107.
Varley, Paul, trans. A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinnō shōtōki of Kitabatake Chikafusa.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Watson, Burton. Records of the Grand Historian of China. Sources and Studies 65, UNESCO
Collection of Representative Works, Records of Civilization. New York and London,
1961.

Heian popular songs: imayō and Ryōjin hishō

Goodwin, Janet R. “Shadows of Transgression: Heian and Kamakura Constructions of
Prostitution.” Monumenta Nipponica 55, no 3 (2000): 327–68.
Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Kawashima, Terry. Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and
Kamakura Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.
Kim, Yung-hee. Songs to Make the Dust Dance: The Ryōjin hishō of Twelfth-Century Japan.
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Kwon, Yung–hee. “Voices from the Periphery: Love Songs in the Ryōjin hisshō.”
Monumenta Nipponica 41, no 1 (1986): 1–20.
“The Emperor’s Songs: Go-Shirakawa and Ryōjin hisshō kudenshū.” Monumenta
Nipponica 41, no. 3 (1986): 261–98.
Marra, Michele. “The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in
Medieval Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no.1 (1993): 49–65.
Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1993.
Moriguchi, Yasuhiko, and David Jenkins, trans. The Dance of the Dust on the Rafters:
Selections from Ryōjin-hishō. Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1990.
Nakahara, Gladys E., trans. A Translation of Ryōjin–hishō: A Compendium of Japanese folk
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Tonomura, Hitomi. “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval
Japan.” American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (1994): 129–54.

The medieval period (1185–1600)

General readings
Carter, Steven, ed. Literary Patronage in Late Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor: Center for
Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1993.
trans. Waiting for the Wind: Thirty-Six Poets of Japan’s Late Medieval Age. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.
Goble, Andrew, Kenneth R. Robinson, and Haruko Wakabayashi, eds. Tools of Culture:
Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s–1500s.
Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2009.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 3, The High Middle Ages. Trans. Aileen
Gatten and Mark Harbison, ed. Earl Miner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991.
LaFleur, William. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Marra, Michele. The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese
Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991.
Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1993.
Mostow, Joshua S. Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin isshu in Word and Image. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.
Souyri, Pierre François. The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society. Trans.
Käthe Roth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Japanese poetic thought, from earliest times to the thirteenth

century
Brower, Robert H. “Fujiwara Teika’s Maigetsushō.” Monumenta Nipponica 40, no. 4 (1985):
399–425.
Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Fujiwara Teika’s Superior Poems of Our Time: A Thirteenth-
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Brower, Robert H., and Steven Carter. Conversations with Shōtetsu: Shōtetsu monogatari.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992.
Commons, Anne. Hitomaro: Poet as God. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2009.
Cranston, Edwin, trans. A Waka Anthology. Vol. 2, Grasses of Remembrance. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006.
Huey, Robert N. “The Medievalization of Poetic Practice.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 50, no. 2 (1990): 651–68.
Ito, Setsuko. “The Muse in Competition: Uta-awase through the Ages.” Monumenta
Nipponica 37, no. 2 (1982): 201–22.
Kato, Hilda. “The Mumyōshō of Kamo no Chōmei and its Significance in Japanese
Literature.” Monumenta Nipponica 23 (1968): 321–430.
McCullough, Helen Craig. Brocade by Night: Kokin Wakashū and the Court Style in Japanese
Classical Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
trans. Kokin Wakashū, The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry, with Tosa Nikki and
Shinsen Waka. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Owen, Stephen. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992.
Rabinovitch, Judith. “Wasp Waists and Monkey Tails: A Study and Translation of
Hamanari’s Uta no Shiki (The Code of Poetry, 772), Also Known as Kakyō Hyōshiki (A
Formulary for Verse Based on the Canons of Poetry).” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51,
no. 2 (1991): 471–560.
Royston, Clifton. “The Poetics and Poetry Criticism of Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204).”
Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1974.
“Utaawase Judgments as Poetry Criticism.” Journal of Asian Studies 34 (1974): 99–108.
Shirane, Haruo. “Lyricism and Intertextuality: An Approach to Shunzei’s Poetics.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50, no. 1 (1990): 71–85.
ed. Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007.
Shirane, Haruo et al., eds. Sekai e hiraku waka: gengo, kyōdōtai, jendā / Waka Opening Up to
the World: Language, Community, and Gender. Tokyo: Benseisha, 2012.
Smits, Ivo. The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca.
1050–1150. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995.
Teele, Nicholas J. “Rules for Poetic Elegance: Fujiwara no Kintō’s Shinsen Zuinō and Waka
Kuhon.” Monumenta Nipponica 31, no. 2 (1976): 145–64.
Wixted, John Timothy. “The Kokinshū Prefaces: Another Perspective.” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (1983): 215–38.

Shinkokin wakashū: The New Anthology of Ancient and

Modern Japanese Poetry
Bialock, David T. “Voice, Text, and the Question of Poetic Borrowing in Late Classical
Japanese Poetry.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 1 (1994): 181–231.
Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1961.
Bundy, Roselee. “The Uses of Literary Tradition: The Poetry and Poetics of the
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Huey, Robert N. The Making of Shinkokinshū. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
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Kamens, Edward. Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry.
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Kawamoto, Kōji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter. Trans. Stephen
Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt, with a Foreword by Haruo Shirane.
Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2000.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. “Association and Progression: Principles of Integration in Anthologies
and Sequences of Japanese Court Poetry, A.D. 900–1350.” Trans. and adapt. Robert
H. Brower and Earl Miner. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 21 (December 1958):
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A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 3, The High Middle Ages. Trans. Aileen Gatten and
Mark Harbison, ed. Earl Miner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Shirane, Haruo. “Lyricism and Intertextuality: An Approach to Shunzei’s Poetics.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50, no. 1 (1990): 71–85.

Waka in the medieval period: patterns of practice and

patronage
Atkins, Paul S. “Nijō v. Reizei: Land Rights, Litigation, and Literary Authority in Medieval
Japan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 66, no. 2 (2006): 495–529.
Brower, Robert H. Fujiwara Teika’s Superior Poems of Our Time: A Thirteenth-Century
Poetic Treatise and Sequence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967.
“Ex-Emperor Go-Toba’s Secret Teachings: Go-Toba no in Gokuden,” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 32 (1972): 32–70.
“Fujiwara Teika’s Maigetsushō.” Monumenta Nipponica 40, no. 4 (1985): 399–425.
“The Foremost Style of Poetic Composition, Fujiwara Tameie’s Eiga no ittei.”
Monumenta Nipponica 42, no. 4 (1987): 391–429.
Brower, Robert H., and Steven D. Carter. Conversations with Shōtetsu: Shōtetsu
monogatari. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992.
Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1961.
Bundy, Roselee. “Fujiwara no Teika.” In Steven D. Carter, ed., Dictionary of Literary
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Marra, Michele. Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan. Honolulu:
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Carter, Steven. Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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Galt, Thomas, trans. The Little Treasury of One Hundred People, One Poem Each. Princeton,
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McMillan, Peter, trans. One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura
Hyakunin Isshu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Mostow, Joshua S. Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.

Medieval recluse literature: Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō

Allen, Laura W. “Images of the Poet Saigyō as Recluse.” Journal of Japanese Studies 21, no. 1
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Chambers, Anthony H., trans. “An Account of a Ten-foot-square Hut” In Haruo Shirane,
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Chance, Linda H. Formless in Form: Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, and the Rhetoric of Japanese
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Hare, Thomas B. “Reading Kamo no Chōmei.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 1
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Keene, Donald, trans. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. New York: Columbia
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LaFleur, William R. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan.
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Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyō. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
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Marra, Michele. “Semi-recluses (tonseisha) and Impermanence (mujō): Kamo no Chōmei
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The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature.
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Mezaki Tokue. “Aesthete-Recluses during the Transition from Ancient to Medieval
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Moore, Jean. “Senjūshō: Buddhist Tales of Renunciation.” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 2
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Moriguchi, Yasuhiko, and David Jenkins, trans. Hōjōki: Visions of a Torn World. Berkeley,
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Pandey, Rajyashree. “Suki and Religious Awakening: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hosshinshū.”
Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 3 (1992): 299–321.
“Love, Poetry and Renunciation: Changing Configurations of the Ideal of Suki.” Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 5, no. 2 (1995): 225–44.
Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chōmei.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998.
Rohlich, Thomas H. “Two Monks and the Mountain Village Ideal.” In Nalini Bhushan, Jay
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Smits, Ivo. The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca.
1050–1150. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1995.
Stoneman, Jack. “So Deep in the Mountains: Saigyō’s Yama fukami Poems and Reclusion in
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“Between Monks: Saigyō’s Shukke, Homosocial Desire, and Japanese Poetry.” Japanese
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Watson, Burton, and Stephen Addiss. Four Huts: Asian Writings on the Simple Life. Boston,
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Medieval women’s diaries: from Tamakiwaru to

Takemukigaki
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Chung, Young-ah. “A Medieval Woman at Court and Her Testimony of a Life of Great
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Harries, Phillip Tudor, trans. The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu. Stanford, CA: Stanford
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Setsuwa (anecdotal) literature: Nihon ryōiki to Kokon

chomonjū
Brownlee, John, trans. “Jikkinshō: A Miscellany of Ten Maxims.” Monumenta Nipponica 29,
no. 2 (1974): 121–61.
Dykstra, Yoshiko Kurata, trans. The Konjaku Tales: Indian Section: From a Medieval Japanese
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“Notable Tales Old and New: Tachibana Narisue’s Kokon Chomonjū.” Monumenta
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Osaka: Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai University of Foreign Studies, 1994.
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Geddes, Ward. Kara monogatari: Tales of China. Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona
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Kelsey, W. Michael. Konjaku Monogatari-shū. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
Kimbrough, R. Keller. Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist
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Li, Michelle Osterfeld. Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales.
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Mills, D.E. A Collection of Tales from Uji: A Study and Translation of Uji Shūi Monogatari.
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(1986): 127–74.
Morrell, Robert E. Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishū): The Tales of Mujū Ichien, a Voice for
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Nakamura, Kyoko Motomochi, trans. Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist
Tradition: The Nihon Ryōiki of the Monk Kyōkai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 3 (1992): 299–321.
“Women, Sexuality, and Enlightenment: Kankyo no Tomo.” Monumenta Nipponica 50, no.
3 (1995): 325–56.
Tyler, Royall, trans. Japanese Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
Ury, Marian. “Recluses and Eccentric Monks: Tales from the Hosshinshū by Kamo no
Chōmei.” Monumenta Nipponica 27, no. 2 (1972): 149–73.
Tales of Times Now Past: Sixty-two Stories from a Medieval Japanese Collection. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979.
“The Ōe Conversations.” Monumenta Nipponica 48, no. 3 (1993): 359–80.
Watson, Burton, trans. The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales, ed. Haruo Shirane.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Wilson, William Ritchie. “The Way of the Bow and Arrow: The Japanese Warrior in
Konjaku monogatari.” Monumenta Nipponica 28, no. 2 (1973): 177–233.

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Heiji monogatari
Florence, Goyet. “Narrative Structure and Political Construction: The Epic at Work.” Oral
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Murase, Miyeko. “Japanese Screen Paintings of the Hōgen and Heiji Insurrections.”
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Tomita, Kojiro. “The Burning of the Sanjō Palace (Heiji Monogatari): A Japanese Scroll
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Tyler, Royall. Before Heike and After: Hōgen, Heiji, Jōkyūki. Braidwood, NSW: Arthur
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Varley, Paul. Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1994.
Wilson, W.R. Hogen Monogatari: Tale of the Disorder in Hogen. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1971.

The Tales of the Heike

Bialock, David T. “The Tale of the Heike.” In Steven D. Carter, ed., Dictionary of Literary
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“Nation and Epic: The Tale of the Heike as Modern Classic.” In Haruo Shirane and Tomi
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“Outcasts, Emperorship and Dragon Cults in The Tale of the Heike.” In Bernard Faure,
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Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The
Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
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“From Heike to Nomori no kagami: Onmyōdō and the Soundscapes of Medieval Japan.”
In Bernard Faure and Iyanaga Nobumi, eds., The Way of Yin and Yang: Divinatory
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“Biwa Masters and Musical Hierophanies in the Heike monogatari and Other Medieval
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Butler, Kenneth Dean. “The Textual Evolution of the Heike monogatari.” Harvard Journal of
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De Ferranti, Hugh. The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and
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Kitagawa, Hiroshi, and Bruce T. Tsuchida. The Tale of the Heike. With a Foreword by
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McCullough, Helen Craig, trans. The Tale of the Heike. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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Oyler, Elizabeth. “Giō: Women and Performance in the Heike monogatari.” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 64, no. 2 (2004): 341–65.
Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authorizing Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
Ruch, Barbara. “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature.” In John W.
Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age, 279–309. Berkeley:
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Sadler, A.L. The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike: Being Two Thirteenth-century
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Selinger, Vyjayanthi R. Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the
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Sieffert, René. Le Dit des Heiké: Le Cycle épique des Taïra et des Minamoto. Paris: Publications
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Tyler, Royall, trans. The Tale of the Heike. New York: Viking, 2012.
Watson, Burton, trans. The Tales of the Heike. Edited with an introduction by Haruo
Shirane. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Watson, Michael Geoffrey. “A Narrative Study of the Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari.” D.
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Taiheiki
McCullough, H.C. “A Study of the Taiheiki, a Medieval Japanese Chronicle.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1955.
Mills, D.E. “Soga Monogatari, Shintōshū and the Taketori Legend.” Monumenta Nipponica 30,
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“Kataki-Uchi: The Practice of Blood-Revenge in Pre-Modern Japan.” Modern Asian

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Mueller, Jacqueline. “The Two Shizukas. Zeami’s Futari Shizuka.” Monumenta Nipponica
36, no. 3 (1981): 285–98.
“A Chronicle of Great Peace Played Out on a Chessboard: Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s
Goban Taiheiki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 1 (1986): 221–67.
Murase, Miyeko. “The ‘Taiheiki Emaki’: The Use of the Past.” Artibus Asiae 53, no. 1/2
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“Tonsuring the Performer: Image, Text, and Narrative in the Ballad-Drama Shizuka.”
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Varley, Paul. Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales. Honolulu: University of
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Literature of medieval Zen temples: Gozan (Five Mountains)

and Ikkyū Sōjun
Akamatsu, Yoshihide, and Philip Yampolsky. “Muromachi Zen and the Gozan System.” In
John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age, 313–29. Berkeley:
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Arntzen, Sonja. Ikkyū Sōjun: A Zen Monk and his Poetry. Bellingham, WA: Western
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Ikkyū and the Crazy Cloud Anthology: A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan. Tokyo: University of
Tokyo Press, 1986.
Collcutt, Martin. Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Messer, Sarah and Kidder Smith. Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyū. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Parker, Joseph D. Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan, 1336–1573. SUNY
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Sanford, Jame. Zen-man Ikkyū. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study
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Ury, Marian. Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen
Monasteries. Tokyo: Mushinsha, 1977; 2nd rev. edn., Ann Arbor: University of
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Renga (linked verse)

Carter, Steven D. Three Poets at Yuyama. Berkeley, CA: Center for Japanese Studies, 1983.
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“Mixing Memories: Linked Verse and the Fragmentation of the Court Heritage.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48, no. 1 (1988): 5–45.
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“Chats with the Master: Selections from Kensai Zōdan.” Monumenta Nipponica 56, no. 3
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Cranston, Edwin. “Shinkei’s 1467 Dokugin Hyakuin.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54,
no. 2 (1994): 461–507.
Hare, Thomas W. “Linked Verse at Imashinmei Shrine: Anegakōji Imashinmei Hyakuin,
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Horton, H. Mack. “Renga Unbound: Performative Aspects of Japanese Linked Verse.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, no. 2 (1993): 443–512.
“Nijō Yoshimoto.” In Steven D. Carter, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 203,
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“Saiokuken Sōchō.” In Steven D. Carter, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 203,
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“Jōha, a Sixteenth-Century Poet of Linked Verse.” In George Elison and Bardwell
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80. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1981.
Konishi, Jin’ichi. “The Art of Renga.” Trans. Karen Brazell and Lewis Cook. Journal of
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Miner, Earl. Japanese Linked Poetry: An Account with Translations of Renga and Haikai
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Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ:
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Stanford University Press, 2008.
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Noh drama
Atkins, Paul S. Revealed Identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku. Ann Arbor: University
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University Press, 1988.
Brown, Steven T. Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001.
Goff, Janet. Noh Drama and the Tale of Genji: The Art of Allusion in Fifteen Classical Plays.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Hare, Thomas Blenham. Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1986.
Hoff, Frank, and Willi Flindt. “The Life Structure of Noh: An English Version of
Yokomichi Mario’s Analysis of the Structure of Noh.” Concerned Theatre Japan 2,
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Klein, Susan B. “Esotericism in Noh Commentaries and Plays: Komparu Zenchiku’s
Meishukushū and Kakitsubata.” In Bernhard Scheid and Mark Teeuwen, eds., The
Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion, 229–54. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Lim, Beng Choo. “Performing Furyū Nō: The Theatre of Konparu Zenpō.” Asian Theatre
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O’Neill, P.G. A Guide to Nō. Tokyo: Hinoki Shoten, 1953.
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“The Special Kasuga Wakamiya Festival of 1349.” Monumenta Nipponica 14, no. 3/4
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Oyler, Elizabeth, and Michael Watson. Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō
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Pinnington, Noel J. “Invented Origins: Muromachi Interpretations of Okina Sarugaku.”
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Shively, Donald. “Buddhahood for the Non-Sentient, a Theme in Noh Plays.” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (June 1957): 135–61.
Smethurst, Mae J., and Christina Laffin, eds. The Noh Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from
Many Directions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2003.
Terasaki, Etsuko. Figures of Desire: Wordplay, Spirit Possession, Fantasy, Madness, and
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Tyler, Royall, ed. and trans. Japanese Nō Dramas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
Waley, Arthur, ed. and trans. The Nō Plays of Japan. London: Unwin, 1921.

Noh drama theory from Zeami to Zenchiku

Hare, Thomas Blenman. Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo. Stanford, CA:
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Pilgrim, Richard B. “Some Aspects of Kokoro in Zeami.” Monumenta Nipponica 24, no. 4
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NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2006.
Quinn, Shelly Fenno. Developing Zeami: The Noh Actor’s Attunement in Practice. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.
Rimer, J. Thomas, and Yamazaki Masakazu, trans. On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major
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“Yūgen After Zeami.” In James R. Brandon, ed., Nō and Kyōgen in the Contemporary
World, 36–64. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997.

Kyōgen: comic plays that turn medieval society upside down

Foley, Kathey, Julie Iezzi, and Jonah Salz, eds. Asian Theatre Journal 24, no. 1, Kyōgen Issue
(2007).
Hata, Hisashi. Kyōgen, trans. Don Kenny. Osaka: Hoikusha, 1982.
Kenny, Don. A Guide to Kyogen. Kyoto: Hinoki Shoten, 1968.
The Kyogen Book: An Anthology of Japanese Classical Comedies. Kyoto: The Japan Times,
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Lafleur, William. “Society Upside-down: Kyogen as Satire and as Ritual.” In The Karma of
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McKinnon, Richard. Selected Plays of Kyogen. Seattle: Uniprint, 1968.
Morley, Carolyn. Transformation, Miracles, and Mischief: The Mountain Wizard Plays of
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Sakanishi, Shio. Japanese Folk-Plays: The Ink-Smeared Lady and other Kyōgen. Rutland, VT:
Charles E. Tuttle, 1964.

Late medieval popular fiction and narrated genres: otogizōshi,

kōwakamai, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri
Araki, James T. The Ballad-Drama of Medieval Japan. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1964.
“Otogi-zōshi and Nara-ehon: A Field of Study in Flux.” Monumenta Nipponica 36, no. 1
(1981): 1–20.
Childs, Margaret. Rethinking Sorrow: Revelatory Tales of Late Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1991.
Dunn, C.J. The Early Japanese Puppet Drama. London: Luzac, 1966.
Ishii, Nobuko. “Sekkyō-bushi.” Monumenta Nipponica 44, no. 3 (1989): 283–307.
Kanemitsu, Janice Shizue. “Guts and Tears: Kinpira Jōruri and Its Textual
Transformations.” In Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, eds., Publishing the
Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan, 15–35. Boulder: University of
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Kimbrough, R. Keller. Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist
Literature of Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese
Studies, 2008.
Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Kimbrough, R. Keller, and Hank Glassman, eds. Vernacular Buddhism and Medieval Japanese
Literature. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36, no. 2, Special issue (2009).
Matisoff, Susan. The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978.
“Holy Horrors: The Sermon-Ballads of Medieval and Early Modern Japan.” In James
Sanford, William LaFleur, and Masatoshi Nagatomi, eds., Flowing Traces: Buddhism in
the Literary and Visual Arts of Japan, 234–61. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992.
“Barred from Paradise? Mount Kōya and the Karukaya Legend.” In Barbara Ruch, ed.,
Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, 463–500. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2002.
McCormick, Melissa. Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2009.
Oyler, Elizabeth. Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval
Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
Ruch, Barbara. “Origins of The Companion Library: An Anthology of Medieval Japanese
Stories.” Journal of Asian Studies 30, no. 3 (1971): 593–610.
“Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature.” In John Hall and Toyoda
Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age, 279–309. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977.
Shirane, Haruo. “Cultures of the Book, the Parlor, and the Roadside: Issues of Text,
Picture, and Performance.” In Kenji Kobayashi, Maori Saitō, and Haruo Shirane, eds.,
Japanese Visual Culture: Performance, Media, and Text, 1–14. Tokyo: National Institute of
Japanese Literature, 2013.
Skord, Virginia. Tales of Tears and Laughter: Short Fiction of Medieval Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991.

The Edo period (1600–1867)

General readings
Gerstle, C. Andrew, ed. Eighteenth-Century Japan: Culture and Society. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 1989.
Guth, Christine. Art of Edo Japan: The Artist and the City, 1615–1868. New York: Abrams, 1996.
Hall, John Whitney, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 4, Early Modern Japan.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hirano, Katsuya. The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early
Modern Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Jones, Sumie, and Kenji Watanabe, eds. An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-city,
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Katō, Shūichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 2, The Years of Isolation. Trans. Don
Sanderson. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983.
Keene, Donald. World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600–1867. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.
Nakane, Chie, and Shinzaburo Ōishi, eds. Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic
Antecedents of Modern Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990.
Nishiyama, Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997.
Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries
Chibbett, David. The History of Japanese Printing and Book Illustration. Tokyo: Kodansha
International, 1977.
Formanek, Susanne, and Sepp Linhart, eds. Written Texts – Visual Texts: Woodblock-Printed
Media in Early Modern Japan. Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing, 2005.
Hillier, Jack. The Art of the Japanese Book. London: Philip Wilson, 1987.
Kinoshita, Kyoko. “The Advent of Movable-type Printing: The Early Keichō Period and
Kyoto Cultural Circles.” In Felice Fischer, ed., The Arts of Hon’ami kōetsu, Japanese
Renaissance Master, 56–73. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000.
Kornicki, P.F. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998.
“Unsuitable Books for Women? Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari in Seventeenth-
Century Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 60 (2005): 147–93.
May, Ekkehard. Die Kommerzialisierung der japanischen Literatur in der späten Edo–Zeit.
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983.

A forest of books: seventeenth-century Kamigata commercial

prose
Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Köhn, Stephan. “Between Fiction and Non-fiction – Documentary Literature in the Late
Edo Period.” In Susanne Formanek and Sepp Linhart, eds., Written Texts – Visual
Texts: Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan, 283–310. Amsterdam: Hotei
Publishing, 2005.
Kornicki, Peter. “Women, Education and Literacy.” In P.F. Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and
G.G. Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan,
7–37. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, 2010.
Lane, Richard. “The Beginnings of the Modern Japanese Novel: Kana-zōshi, 1600–1682.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 3/4 (1957): 644–701.

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Moretti, Laura. “Kanazōshi Revisited. The Beginnings of Japanese Popular Literature in

Print.” Monumenta Nipponica 65, no. 2 (2010): 297–356.
“The Japanese Early-Modern Publishing Market Unveiled: A Survey of Edo-Period
Booksellers’ Catalogues,” East Asian Publishing and Society 2, no. 2 (2012): 199–308.
Rucinski, Jack. “A Japanese Burlesque: Nise Monogatari.” Monumenta Nipponica 30, no. 1
(1975): 1–18.
Tocco, Martha. “Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan.” In
Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds., Women and
Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, 193–218. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.

The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi

Issa
Carter, Steven. “On a Bare Branch: Bashō and the Haikai Profession.” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 117.1 (1997): 57–69.
Corman, Cid, and Susumu Kamaike, trans. Back Roads to Far Towns: Bashō’s Oku-no
hosomichi. New York: Mushinsha/Grossman, 1968.
Crowley, Cheryl A. Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007.
Fujikawa, Fumiko. “The Influence of Tu Fu on Bashō.” Monumenta Nipponica 20 (1965):
374–88.
Hibbet, Howard S. “The Japanese Comic Linked Verse Tradition.” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 23 (1961): 76–92.
Huey, Robert N. “Journal of My Father’s Last Days: Issa’s Chichi no shūen nikki.”
Monumenta Nipponica 39 (1984): 25–54.
Imoto, Nōichi. “Independence of Hokku in Haikai and its Significance.” Acta Asiatica 9
(1964): 20–35.
Kawamoto, Kōji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter. Tokyo: University
of Tokyo Press. 2000.
Keene, Donald, “Bashō’s Journey of 1684.” Asia Major, n.s., 7 (1959): 131–44.
“Bashō’s Diaries.” Japan Quarterly 32 (1985): 374–83.
trans. The Narrow Road to Oku. New York: Kōdansha International, 1996.
Mackenzie, Lewis, trans. The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa. London:
Murray, 1957.
McCullough, Helen, trans. “The Narrow Road of the Interior.” In Helen McCullough, ed.,
Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology, 522–51. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Miner, Earl, trans. Japanese Linked Poetry: An Account with Translations of Renga and Haikai
Sequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1979.
Miner, Earl, and Hiroko Odagiri, trans. The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the
Bashō School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Morris, Mark. “Buson and Shiki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 and 45 (1984 and 1985):
381–425, 256–319.
Nippon gakujutsu shinkōkai, ed. Haikai and Haiku, 41–51. Tokyo: Nippon gakujutsu
shinkōkai, 1958.
Shirane, Haruo. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

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Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki: the literature of urban

townspeople
Drake, Christopher. “Mirroring Saikaku.” Monumenta Nipponica 46, no. 4 (1991): 513–41.
“The Collision of Traditions in Saikaku’s Haikai.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52,
no. 1 (1992): 5–75.
“Saikaku’s Haikai Requiem: A Thousand Haikai Alone in a Single Day: The First
Hundred Verses.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52, no. 2 (1992): 481–588.
Dunn, Charles J., and Bunzō Torigoe, trans. Hachimonjiya, Jishō. The Actors’ Analects
(Yakusha rongo). New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Hibbett, Howard S. “Ejima Kiseki (1667–1736) and His Katagi-mono.” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 14, no. 3/4 (1951): 404–32.
“The Role of the Ukiyo-Zōshi Illustrator.” Monumenta Nipponica 13, no. 1/2 (1957): 67–82.
The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
“The Japanese Comic Linked-Verse Tradition.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 23
(1960–1): 76–92.
Jones, Sumie, and Kenji Watanabe, eds. An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City,
1750–1850. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013.
Keene, Donald. World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600–1867. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.
Lane, Richard. “Postwar Japanese Studies of the Novelist Saikaku.” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 18 (1955): 181–99.
“Saikaku’s Prose Works: A Bibliographical Study.” Monumenta Nipponica 14 (1958): 1–26.
“Saikaku and the Japanese Novel of Realism.” Japan Quarterly 4 (1957): 178–88.
Noma, Kōshin. “Saikaku’s Adoption of Shukō from Kabuki and Jōruri.” Acta Asiatica 28
(1975): 62–83.
Saltzman-Li, Katherine. Creating Kabuki Plays: Context for Kezairoku, “Valuable Notes for
Playwriting.” Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010.
Schalow, Paul Gordon, trans. Ihara Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990.

Representing theater: text and performance in kabuki and

bunraku
Brandon, James. Kabuki: Five Classic Plays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Brazell, Karen. Traditional Japanese Theatre: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998.
Choo, Lim Beng. “They Came to Party – An Examination of the Social Status of the
Medieval Noh Theater.” Japan Forum (2004): 111–33.
Clark, Timothy, ed. Dawn of the Floating World, 1650–1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. London: Royal Academy of Art, 2001.
Clark, Timothy, and Osamu Ueda. The Actors’ Image: Printmakers of the Katsukawa School.
Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.
Davis, Julie. Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty. London: Reaktion, 2007.
Gerstle, Andrew. Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu. Cambridge, MA:
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Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
“The Culture of Play: Kabuki and the Production of Texts.” Oral Tradition 20, no. 2
(2005): 188–216.
Gerstle, Andrew, Timothy Clark, and Akiko Yano. Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage: 1780–
1830. London: British Museum Press, 2005.
Ikegami, Eiko. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese
Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Jones Jr., Stanleigh, trans. Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
trans. Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees: A Masterpiece of the Eighteenth Century
Japanese Puppet Theater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Keene, Donald. Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
trans. Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971.
Kimbrough, Keller, and Satoko Shimazaki, eds. Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in
Early Modern Japan. Boulder: Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado
Boulder, 2011.
Saltzman-Li, Katherine. Creating Kabuki Plays: Context for Keizairoku, “Valuable Notes on
Playwriting”. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010.
Shimazaki, Satoko. “The Ghost of Oiwa in Actor Prints: Confronting Disfigurement.”
Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 29 (2008): 76–97.
“The End of the ‘World’: Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Female Ghosts and Late Tokugawa
Kabuki.” Monumenta Nipponica 66, no. 2 (2011): 209–46.
Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
Shively, Donald. “Chikamatsu’s Satire on the Dog Shogun.” Harvard Journal of Asian
Studies 18, no. 1/2 (1955): 159–80.
Thornbury, Barbara. Sukeroku’s Double Identity: The Dramatic Structure of Edo Kabuki.
Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies 6. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1982.

Puppet theater: from early jōruri to the golden age

Adachi, Barbara C., and Joel Sackett. Backstage at Bunraku: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at
Japan’s Traditional Puppet Theatre. New York: Weatherhill, 1985.
Brandon, James R., ed. Chūshingura: Studies in Kabuki and the Puppet Theater. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1982.
Brazell, Karen, ed. Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays. New York:
Columbia, 1998.
Coaldrake, Angela Kimi. Women’s Gidayū and the Japanese Theatre Tradition. London and
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Dunn, Charles James. The Early Japanese Puppet Drama. London: Luzac, 1966.
Gerstle, C. Andrew. Circles of Fantasy: Conventions in the Plays of Chikamatsu. Cambridge,
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Griffiths, Paul M., trans. Chikamatsu Hanji, Miyoshi Shōraku, Takeda Inaba, Takemoto
Saburōbei, and Takeda Hanbei. “Honchō nijūshikō: Japan’s Twenty-Four Paragons
of Filial Piety.” In James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, eds., Kabuki Plays on Stage.
Vol. 1, Brilliance and Bravado, 326–52. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
Jones, Stanleigh H., Jr., trans. Fukuuchi, Kigai (Hiraga Gennai). “Miracle at Yaguchi Ferry: A
Japanese Puppet Play and its Metamorphosis to Kabuki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 38, no. 1 (1978): 171–224.
trans. and ed. Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985.
trans. and annot. Chikamatsu Hanji and Chikamatsu Kasaku. “Vengeance and its Toll in
‘Numazu’: An Eighteenth-Century Japanese Puppet Play.” Asian Theatre Journal 7, no.
1 (1990): 42–75.
trans. Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees: A Masterpiece of Eighteenth-Century
Japanese Puppet Theater. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Keene, Donald, trans. and ed. Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961.
trans. Takeda Izumo II, Miyoshi Shō raku, and Namiki Senryū . Chushingura: The
Treasury of Loyal Retainers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Bunraku: The Art of the Japanese Puppet Theatre. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973
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Early Modern Japan. Boulder: Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado,
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Lee, William. “Chikamatsu and Dramatic Literature in the Meiji Period.” In Haruo
Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity,
and Japanese Literature, 179–98. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Mueller, Jacqueline. “A Chronicle of Great Peace Played Out on a Chessboard: Chikamatsu
Monzaemon’s Goban Taiheiki.” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1986): 221–67.
Namiki Sōsuke, Miyoshi Shōraku, and Takeda Koizumo. “Summer Festival: Mirror of
Osaka (Natsu matsuri Naniwa Kagami).” Trans. Julie A. Iezzi. In James R. Brandon
and Samuel L. Leiter, eds., Kabuki Plays on Stage. Vol. 1, Brilliance and Bravado, 196–233.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
Shively, Donald. The Love Suicides at Amijima: A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by
Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

From the beginnings of kabuki to the playwrights Nanboku

and Mokuami
Brandon, James, ed. Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1978.
Brandon, James, and Samuel L. Leiter, eds. Kabuki Plays on Stage. 4 vols. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002–3.
Brazell, Karen, ed. Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays. New York: Columbia
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Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Gunji, Masakatsu. “Kabuki and its Social Background.” Trans. Conrad D. Totman. In
Nakane Chie and Ōishi Shinzaburō, eds., Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic
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Kawatake, Shigetoshi. Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts. Trans. Frank and Jean Connell Hoff.
Tokyo: International House of Japan, LTCB International Library, 2003.
Kincaid, Zoë. Kabuki, the Popular Stage of Japan. London: Macmillan, 1925.
Kominz, Laurence R. Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995.
Leiter, Samuel L. A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002.
Frozen Moments: Writings on Kabuki 1966–2001. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia
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Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theater: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism.
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Shively, Donald H. “Bakufu versus Kabuki.” In J.W. Hall and M.B. Jansen, eds., Studies in
the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, 231–61. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1968.

Early to mid-Edo Kanshi

Ackroyd, Joyce, trans. Arai Hakuseki. Tales around a Brushwood Fire: The Autobiography of
Arai Hakuseki. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1979.
Bradstock, Timothy R., and Judith N. Rabinovitch, trans. and annot. An Anthology of Kanshi
(Chinese Verse) by Japanese Poets of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Japanese Studies 3.
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.
Rabinovitch, Judith N., and Timothy R. Bradstock, trans. and annot. The Kanshi Poems
of the Ōzasa Collection: Late Edo Life through the Eyes of Kyoto Townsmen. Nichibunken
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Spae, Joseph John. Itō Jinsai: A Philosopher, Educator and Sinologist of the Tokugawa Period.
Monumenta Serica Monograph Series. Peiping: Catholic University of Peking, 1948.
Watson, Burton, trans. Japanese Literature in Chinese. Vol. 2, Poetry and Prose in Chinese by
Japanese Writers of the Later Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
trans. Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei. Translations from the
Oriental Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
trans. Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jōzan and Other Edo-Period Poets. San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1990.
Yamashita, Samuel Hideo. “Compasses and Carpenter’s Squares: A Study of Itō Jinsai
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Kanshibun in the late Edo period

Markus, Andrew, trans. Terakado Seiken. “Account of the Prosperity of Edo. Asakusa
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Pollack, David. “Kyōshi: Japanese ‘Wild Poetry.’” Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (1979):
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Rabinovitch, Judith N., and Timothy R. Bradstock, trans. and annot. The Kanshi Poems of
the Ozasa Tanzaku Collection: Late Edo Life through the Eyes of Kyoto Townsmen. Kyoto:
International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2002.
Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese. Vol. 2, Poetry and Prose in Chinese
by Japanese Writers of the Later Period. New York: Columbia University Press,
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Waka practice and poetics in the Edo period

Flueckiger, Peter. Imagining Harmony: Poetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-
Tokugawa, Confucianism and Nativism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
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University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Ōkuma, Kotomichi. A Grass Path: Selected Poems from Sōkeishū. Trans. Marjorie Sinclair and
Yukuo Uehara. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1955.
Thomas, Roger K. “‘High’ versus ‘Low’: The Fude no Saga Controversy and Bakumatsu
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“Macroscopic vs. Microscopic: Spatial Sensibilities in Waka of the Bakumatsu Period.”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 58, no. 2 (1998): 513–42.
“A Voice of the Tenpō Era: The Poetics of Ōkuma Kotomichi.” Monumenta Nipponica
59, no. 3 (2004): 321–58.
The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan. Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 2008.
Watson, Burton, trans. Ryōkan. Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977.

Literary thought in Confucian ancient learning and Kokugaku

Burns, Susan. Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern
Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Flueckiger, Peter. “Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country: Kamo no Mabuchi’s
Kokuikō.” Monumenta Nipponica 63, no. 2 (2008): 211–63.
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Marceau, Lawrence. “Ninjō and the Affective Value of Literature at the Kogidō Academy.”
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Marra, Michael. “Nativist Hermeneutics: The Interpretive Strategies of Motoori Norinaga
and Fujitani Mitsue.” Japan Review 10 (1998): 17–52.
The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
Maruyama Masao. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan. Trans. Mikiso Hane.
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Nishimura, Sey. “The Way of the Gods: Motoori Norinaga’s Naobi no mitama.” Monumenta
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Sakai, Naoki. Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese
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Ogyū Sorai’s Philosophical Masterworks: The “Bendō” and “Benmei.” Honolulu: University
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Yamashita, Samuel Hideo. Master Sorai’s Responsals: An Annotated Translation of “Sorai
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Yoda, Tomiko. “Fractured Dialogues: Mono no aware and Poetic Communication in The
Tale of Genji.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59, no. 2 (1999): 523–57.
Yoshikawa Kōjirō. Jinsai, Sorai, Norinaga: Three Classical Philologists of Mid-Tokugawa Japan.
Tokyo: Tōhō Gakkai, 1983.

Bunjin (literati) and early yomihon: Nankaku, Nankai,

Buson, Gennai, Teishō, Ayatari, and Akinari
Chambers, Anthony, trans. “Hankai: A Translation from Harusame monogatari, by Ueda
Akinari.” Monumenta Nipponica 25, no. 3/4 (1970): 371–406.
Clarke, William E., and Wendy E. Cobcroft, trans. and eds. Ueda Akinari: Tandai Shōshin
Roku. Sydney: Premodern Japanese Studies (pmjs.org), 2009.
Crowley, Cheryl A. Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Bashō Revival. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007.
Flueckiger, Peter. Imagining Harmony: Poetry, Empathy, and Community in Mid-Tokugawa
Confucianism and Nativism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Graham, Patricia J. Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 1999.
Jones, Sumie with Kenji Watanabe, eds. An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-city,
1750–1850. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013.

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Marceau, Lawrence E. Takebe Ayatari: A Bunjin Bohemian in Early Modern Japan. Ann
Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004.
Ōba, Osamu. “Sino-Japanese Relations in the Edo Period: Part Four. The Inspectorate of
Books.” Trans. Joshua A. Fogel. Sino-Japanese Studies 9, no. 2 (1996): 11–12.
Books and Boats: Sino-Japanese Relations and Cultural Transmission in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Joshua A. Fogel. Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2012.
Pastreich, Emanuel. The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a
Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan. Seoul: Seoul National University
Press, 2011.
Sakaki, Atsuko. Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
Stanley-Baker, Joan (Xu Xiaohu). The Transmission of Chinese Idealist Painting to Japan: Notes
on the Early Phase (1661–1799). Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan, 1992.
Sze, Mai-mai. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting: Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan,
1679–1701. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Waddell, Norman. The Old Tea Seller Baisaō: Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Century Kyoto.
Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008.
Wixted, John Timothy. “Poetry of the Fourteenth Century.” In Victor H. Mair, ed.,
Columbia History of Chinese Literature, 390–8. New York: Columbia University Press,
2001.
Yonezawa, Yoshiho, and Chu Yoshizawa. Japanese Painting in the Literati Style. Trans. and
adapt. Mary Iverson Monroe. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1974 (Japanese
original, 1966).
Yoshikawa, Kōjirō. Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150–1650. Trans. John
Timothy Wixted. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 (Japanese
original, 1963).
Young, Blake Morgan. Ueda Akinari. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1982.
“A Tale of the Western Hills: Takebe Ayatari’s Nishiyama Monogatari.” Monumenta
Nipponica 37, no. 1 (1982): 77–88.

Satiric poetry: Kyōshi, Kyōka, and Senryū

Betchaku, Yasuko, and Joan Mirviss, trans. Kitagawa Utamaro, Songs of the Garden. New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Viking Press, 1984.
Blyth, Reginald H., ed. Edo Satirical Verse Anthologies. Tokyo: Hokuseidō Press, 1961.
Japanese Life and Characters in Senryū. Tokyo: Hokuseidō Press, 1961.
Bradstock, Timothy R., and Judith N. Rabinovitch. An Anthology of Kanshi (Chinese Verse) by
Japanese Poets of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.
Carter, Steven. Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991.
Markus, Andrew. “Dōmyaku Sensei and ‘The Housemaid’s Ballad’ (1769).” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 58 (1998): 5–57.
Pollack, David. “Kyōshi: Japanese ‘Wild Poetry.’” Journal of Asian Studies 38 (1979): 499–517.

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 Bibliography

Sato, Hiroki, and Burton Watson, eds. and trans. From the Country of Eight Islands: An
Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1981.
Ueda, Makoto, ed. and trans. Light Verse from the Floating World: An Anthology of Premodern
Japanese Senryu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Picture books: from akahon to kibyōshi and gōkan

Araki, James. “The Dream Pillow in Edo Fiction: 1772–81.” Monumenta Nipponica 25, no. 1
(1970): 43–105.
Emmerich, Michael. The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Griswold, Susan. “The Triumph of Materialism: The Popular Fiction of 18th-Century
Japan.” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 1 (1995): 235–45.
Iwasaki, Haruko. “Matsudaira Sadanobu: Portrait of a Daimyo, Comic Fiction by
Matsudaira Sadanobu.” Monumenta Nipponica 38, no. 1 (1983): 1–48.
“The World of Gesaku: Playful Writers of Late Eighteenth-Century Japan.” Ph.D. diss.,
Harvard University, 1984.
Jones, Sumie. “Comic Fiction in Japan during the Later Edo Period.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of Washington, 1979.
Kern, Adam. Manga of the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Markus, Andrew. The Willow in Autumn: Ryūtei Tanehiko, 1783–1842. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 1992.
Shiokawa, Kanoko. “‘The Reads’ and ‘Yellow Covers’: Pre-modern Predecessors of Comic
Books in Japan.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 7, nos. 1 and 2 (1996): 19–29.
Sitkin, David. “The Upside-Down Topos: Exaggeration and Inversion in the Kibyōshi of
Santō Kyōden.” Nagoya daigaku sōgō gengo sentā gengo bunka ronshū 2, no. 1 (1980):
269–83.
Togasaki, Fumiko. “Santō Kyōden’s Kibyōshi: Visual-Verbal and Contemporary-Classic
Intercommunications.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1995.
“The Assertion of Heterodoxy in Kyōden’s Verbal-Visual Texts.” In Martin Heusser et
al., eds., The Pictured Word: Word and Image Interactions 2, 287–98. Amsterdam and
Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 1998.
“The Emergence of the Autonomous Image in Pre-modern Japanese Word and Image
Text.” In Martin Heusser et al., eds., On Verbal/Visual Representation: Word and Image
Interactions 4, 95–107. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 2005.

The birth of kokkeibon (comic novellas)

Leutner, Robert. Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985.
Satchell, Thomas, trans. Ikku Jippensha. Shanks’ Mare: Being a Translation of the Tokaido
Volumes of Hizakurige, Japan’s Great Comic Novel of Travel and Ribaldry. Rutland, VT,
and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1983.
Vilnis, Charles, trans. Shikitei Sanba, The Barbershop of the Floating World: (1813–1823) Book 1,
part 1. Hollywood, CA: Highmoon, 2010.

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Ninjōbon and romances for women

Kuki, Shūzō. Reflections of Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki. Trans. John Clark. Sydney:
Power Publications, 1997.
Woodhull, Alan S. “Romantic Edo Fiction: A Study of the Ninjōbon and Complete
Translation of ‘Shunshoku umegoyomi.’” PhD. diss., Stanford University, 1978.

Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei

Bakin
Blacker, Carmen, trans. Santō, Kyōden. The Straw Sandal Or The Scroll of the Hundred Crabs.
Folkestone: Globe Oriental, 2008.
Devitt, Jane. “Santō Kyōden and the Yomihon.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39, no. 2
(1979): 253–74.
Walley, Glynne. “Gender and Virtue in Nansō Satomi hakkenden.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 72, no. 2 (2012): 337–71.
Zolbrod, Leon M. “Yomihon: The Appearance of the Historical Novel in Late Eighteenth
Century and Early Nineteenth Century Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 25 (1966):
485–98.
Takizawa Bakin. New York: Twayne, 1967.
“Tigers, Boars, and Severed Heads: Parallel Series of Episodes in Eight ‘Dogs’ and ‘Men
of the Marshes.’” Chung Chi Journal 7 (1967): 30–9.
“The Autumn of the Epic Romance in Japan: Theme and Motif in Takizawa Bakin’s
Historical Novels.” Literature East and West 14 (1970): 172–84.
“The Allegory of Evil in Satomi and the Eight ‘Dogs.’” In Katsuhiko Takeda, ed., Essays
on Japanese Literature, 76–94. Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1977.

The modern period (1868 to present)

General readings
De Bary, Theodore, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, eds. Sources of Japanese Tradition.
Vol. 2, 1600–2000. 2nd edn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Duus, Peter, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Goossen, Theodore, ed. The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. 3rd edn.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Jansen, Marius, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Karatani, Kōjin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Trans. Brett de Bary. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993.
Katō Shūichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Vol. 3, The Modern Years. Trans. Don
Sanderson. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983.
Keene, Donald, ed. Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

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Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. 2 vols. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Wilson, 1984.
Maeda, Ai. Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. Ed. James A. Fujii. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004.
Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974.
Orbaugh, Sharalyn, ed. “Part II: Japan.” In Joshua S. Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion
to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Rimer, J. Thomas, and Van C. Gessel, eds. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese
Literature. Vol. 1, From Restoration to Occupation 1868–1945. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005.
Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1976.

Nation building, literary culture, and language

Brownstein, Michael C. “From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku: Canon-Formation in the Meiji
Period.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (1987), 435–60.
Fukuzawa, Yukichi. Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women: Selected Works. Trans. Eiichi
Kiyooka. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1988.
The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. Trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (revised translation). New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
An Outline of a Theory of Civilization [electronic resource]. Revised trans. David
A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst III. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
An Encouragement of Learning. Trans. David Dilworth. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012.
Gluck, Carol. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
Hill, Christopher. National History and the World of Nations. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008.
Kamei, Hideo. Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature. Trans.
and ed. Michael Bourdaghs. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan, 2002.
Kornicki, Peter. The Reform of Fiction in Meiji Japan. London: Ithaca Press, 1982.
Lee, Yeounsuk. The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010.
Meech-Pekarik, Julia. The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization. New
York: Weatherhill, 1986.
Meiroku zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment. Trans. William Braisted. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Pyle, Kenneth B. The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969.
Shirane, Haruo, and Tomi Suzuki, eds. Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity,
and Japanese Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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Suzuki, Sadami. The Concept of “Literature” in Japan. Trans. Royall Tyler. Kyoto:
International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2006.
Tsubouchi, Shōyō. The Essence of the Novel. Trans. Nanette Twine. Occasional Papers 11.
Department of Japanese, University of Queensland, 1981.
Twine, Nanette. Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese. London:
Routledge, 1991.
Ueda, Atsuko. Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of Literature in
Meiji Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Walker, Janet. The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Peiod and the Ideal of Individualism. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Kanshibun in the Meiji period and beyond

Addiss, Stephen, and Jonathan Chaves. Old Taoist: The Life, Art, and Poetry of Kodōjin (1865–
1944). New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Fraleigh, Matthew. “Songs of the Righteous Spirit: ‘Men of High Purpose’ and their
Chinese Poetry in Modern Japan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 69 (July 2009):
109–71.
Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern
Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015.
Keene, Donald. “The Survival of Chinese Literary Traditions in the Meiji Era.” In Yue-
him Tam, ed., Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange: Aspects of Literature and Language
Learning. Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese Studies, the Chinese University of Hong
Kong, 1985.
Narushima, Ryūhoku. New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West:
Narushima Ryūhoku Reports from Home and Abroad. Trans. Matthew Fraleigh. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2010.
Rabinovitch, Judith N., and Timothy R. Bradstock. “Paulownia Leaves Falling; the Kanshi
Poetry of Inaga Nanpo (1865–1901).” Japan Review 21 (2009): 33–122.
Watson, Burton. Japanese Literature in Chinese: Poetry and Prose by Japanese Writers of the
Later Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
Wixted, John Timothy. “Mori Ōgai: Translation Transforming the Word/World.”
Japonica Humboldtiana 13 (2010): 61–109.

Translated fiction, political fiction

Kurita, Kyoko. “Meiji Japan’s Y23 Crisis and the Discovery of the Future: Suehiro Tetchō’s
Nijūsan-nen mirai-ki.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60, no.1 (2000): 5–43.
Levy, Indra, ed. Translation in Modern Japan. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Mertz, John. Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870–88. Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.
Sakaki, Atsuko. “Kajin no Kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of
Literature.” Monumenta Nipponica 55, no.1 (2000): 83–108.
Washburn, Dennis. Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

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 Bibliography

Newspaper serials in the late nineteenth century

Huffman, James. Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1997.
Marran, Christine. Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Miller, J. Scott. Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Saito, Satoru. Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.

Translation, vernacular style, and the westernesque femme

fatale in modern Japanese literature
Levy, Indra. Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation and
Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
ed. Translation in Modern Japan. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
Tayama, Katai. The Quilt and Other Stories. Trans. Kenneth Henshall. Tokyo: University of
Tokyo Press, 1981.
Literary Life in Tokyo, 1885–1915. Trans. Kenneth Henshall. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987.
Tomasi, Massimiliano. Rhetoric in Modern Japan: Western Influences on the Development of
Narrative and Oratorical Style. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004.
The Literary Theory of Shimamura Hôgetsu (1871–1918) and the Development of Feminist
Discourse in Modern Japan. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

The rise of modern women’s literature

Bernstein, Gail Lee, ed. Recreating Japanese women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991.
Brownstein, Michael. “Jogaku Zasshi and the Founding of Bungakukai.” Monumenta
Nipponica 35, no. 3 (1980): 319–36.
Copeland, Rebecca. Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2000.
Copeland, Rebecca, and Melek Ortabasi, eds. The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of
Meiji Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Danly, Robert. In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyō, A Woman
of Letters in Meiji Japan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Loftus, Ronald. Telling Lives: Women’s Self-Writing in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 2004.
Patessio, Mara. “Readers and Writers: Japanese Women and Magazines in the Late
Nineteenth Century.” In P.F. Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and G.G. Rowley, eds., The
Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan, 191–213. Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010.

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Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2011.
Rowley, G.G. Yosano Akiko and the Tale of Genji. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 2000.
Sievers, Sharon. Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Tanaka, Yukiko. Women Writers of Meiji and Taishō Japan: Their Lives, Work and Critical
Reception, 1868–1926. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2000.
Van Compernolle, Timothy. The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of
Higuchi Ichiyō. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

Melodrama, family romance, and the novel at the turn of the

century
Inouye, Charles Shirō. The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyōka
(1873–1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center, 1998.
Ito, Ken K. An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-
Century Japanese Novel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Ozaki, Kōyō. The Gold Demon. Trans. A. and M. Lloyd. Tokyo: Seibundō, 1917.
Poulton, M. Cody. Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka. Ann Arbor: Center for
Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001.
Zwicker, Jonathan. Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the
Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center, 2006.

Modern Japanese poetry to the 1910s

Beichman, Janine. Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in
Modern Japanese Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002.
Bownas, Geoffrey, and Anthony Thwayte. The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse: From the
Earliest Times to the Present. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 2009.
Kawamoto, Kōji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter. Trans. Stephen
Collington, Kevin Collings, and Gustav Heldt. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,
2000.
Sato, Hiroaki, and Burton Watson, eds. and trans. From the Country of Eight Islands: An
Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1981.
Shiffert, Edith Marcombe and Yūki Sawa. Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry. Rutland, VT:
Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972.
Ueda, Makoto, ed. Modern Japanese Haiku: An Anthology. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1976.
ed. Modern Japanese Tanka: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Watson, Burton, trans. Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997.

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 Bibliography

Between the Western and the traditional: Mori Ōgai, Nagai

Kafū, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō
Bienati, Luisa, and Bonaventura Ruperti, eds. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition:
Essays on Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in Honor of Adriana Boscaro. Ann Arbor: Center for
Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009.
Bowring, Richard. Mori Ōgai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Chambers, Anthony. The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1994.
Dilworth, David, and J. Thomas Rimer, eds. The Historical Literature of Mori Ogai. 2 vols.
Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i, 1977.
Hutchinson, Rachael. Nagai Kafu’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2011.
Ito, Ken. Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991.
Marcus, Marvin. Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ogai.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993.
McClellan, Edwin. Woman in the Crested Kimono. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985.
Rimer, J. Thomas, ed. Youth and Other Stories. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994.
ed. Not a Song Like Any Other: An Anthology of Writings by Mori Ogai. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004.
Seidensticker, Edward. Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879–1959.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965.
Snyder, Stephen. Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.

Natsume Sōseki and the theory and practice of literature

Auestad, Reiko Abe. Rereading Sōseki: Three Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Novels.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998.
Fujii, James A. Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Marcus, Marvin. Reflections in a Glass Door: Memory and Melancholy in the Personal Writing of
Natsume Soseki. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.
Natsume, Soseki. Kokoro. Trans. Edwin McClellan. Chicago: Regnery, 1957.
The Wayfarer. Trans. Beongcheon Yu. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.
Grass on the Wayside. Trans. Edwin McClellan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969.
And Then. Trans. Norma Field. New York: Putnam, 1978.
The Miner. Trans. Jay Rubin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Kusamakura. Trans. Meredith McKinney. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings. Ed. Michael Bourdaghs, Astuko Ueda,
and Joseph Murphy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

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 Bibliography

Kokoro. Trans. Meredith McKinney. New York: Penguin, 2010.

Sanshirō. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Gate. Trans. William Sibley. New York: New York Review of Books, 2012.
Botchan. Trans. Joel Cohn. Reprinted edition. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Light and Dark: A Novel. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Columbia University Press,
2013.
Sakaki, Atsuko. Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.
Yiu, Angela. Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 1998.
Yu, Beongcheon. Natsume Soseki. Twayne’s World Authors Series 99. New York: Twayne,
1969.

A new era of women writers

Bardsley, Jan. The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007.
Copeland, Rebecca, ed. Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
Copeland, Rebecca, and Melek Ortabasi, eds. The Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of
Meiji Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Ericson, Joan E. Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997.
Frederick, Sarah. Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.
Hiratsuka Raichō. In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: Autobiography of a Japanese
Feminist. Trans. Teruko Craig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Lowy, Dina. The Japanese “New Woman”: Images of Gender and Modernity. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Mulhern, Chieko, ed. Japanese Women Writers: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1994.
Sato, Barbara. The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Interwar Japan.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese
Literature and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Tanaka, Yukiko, ed. To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers, 1913–1938.
Seattle: Seal Press, 1987.

Literary marketplace, politics, and history: 1900s–1940s

Bourdaghs, Michael. The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese
Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Dodd, Steven. Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature.
Cembridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.
Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese
Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

811
 Bibliography

Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela. Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-

cultural Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Monographs,
1996 (original publication in German, 1981).
Kobayashi, Hideo. Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo – Literary Criticism 1924–1939.
Ed. and trans. Paul Anderer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Kobayashi, Takiji. “The Factory Ship” and “The Absentee Landlord.” Trans. Frank Motofuji.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.
Kuroshima, Denji. A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings. Trans. Zeljko
Cipris. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.
Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: M.E.
Sharpe, 1980.
Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Rubin, Jay. Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1984.
Sakai, Cécile. Histoire de la littérature populaire japonaise. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987.
Silverberg, Miriam. Changing Song: the Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Suzuki, Tomi, Hirokazu Toeda, Hikari Hori, and Kazushige Munakata, eds. Censorship,
Media and Literary Culture in Japan: From Edo to the Postwar. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012.
Tansman, Alan, ed. The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009.
Thornber, Karen. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations
of Japanese Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.
Torrance, Richard. The Fiction of Tokuda Shūsei, and the Emergence of Japan’s New Middle
Class. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Canonization and popularization: anthologies and literary

prizes
Mack, Edward. Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the
Ascription of Literary Value. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Shirane, Haruo, ed. Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Shirane, Haruo, and Tomi Suzuki, eds. Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity,
and Japanese Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Colonialism, translation, literature: Takahama Kyoshi’s

passage to Korea
Atkins, E. Taylor. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010.
Brandt, Kim. Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Capiro, Mark E. Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea 1910–1945. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2009.

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 Bibliography

Kwon, Nayoung Aimee. “Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation:

Korean Literature in the Japanese Empire.” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010):
421–39.
Mason, Michele, and Helen Lee, eds. Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2012.
Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Suh, Serk-Bae. Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korean and
Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s. Berkeley: Global, Area, and International Archive/
University of California Press, 2013.
Tansman, Alan. The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009.
Uchida, Jun. Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Primitivism and imperial literature of Taiwan and the South

Seas
Ching, Leo. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Kleeman, Faye Yuan. Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the
South. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.
Mason, Michele, and Helen Lee, eds. Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context and Critique.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Tierney, Robert. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to

early 1950s
Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Essential Akutagawa: Rashomon, Hell Screen Cogwheels, A Fool’s Life
and Other Short Fiction. Ed. Seiji M. Lippit. Venice: Marsilio Publishers, 1999.
Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1999.
Golley, Gregory. When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese
Literary Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
Hayashi, Fumiko. Floating Clouds. Trans. Lane Dunlop. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006.
Hotta, Yoshie. “Shadow Pieces.” Trans. P.G. O’Neill. Japan Quarterly 13:3 (1966): 348–65.
Kawana, Sari. Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Kobayashi, Hideo. Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo – Literary Criticism 1924–1939.
Ed. and trans. Paul Anderer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Lippit, Seiji Mizuta. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002.

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Maeda, Ai. Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. Ed. James A. Fujii. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004.
Oguma, Eiji. A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images. English edition. Melbourne: Trans Pacific
Press, 2002.
Ōoka, Shōhei. Fires on the Plain. Trans. Ivan Morris. New York: Knopf, 1957 (1989 Tuttle
paperback reprint).
Suzuki, Tomi. Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996.
Takeyama, Michio. The Harp of Burma. Trans. Howard Hibbett. Rutland, VT: Charles E.
Tuttle, 1966.
Yiu, Angela, ed. Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist
Fiction, 1911–1932. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013.
Yokomitsu, Riichi. Love and Other Stories of Yokomitsu Riichi. Trans. Dennis Keene. Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press, 1974.
Shanghai. Trans. Dennis Washburn. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University
of Michigan, 2001.

Japanese literature and cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s

Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Expanded edn.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Bernardi, Joanne. Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement.
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
Gerow, Aaron. A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Ann Arbor: Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2008.
Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Gerow, Aaron, and Abé Mark Nornes, eds. In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of
Makino Mamoru. Victoria, BC: Trafford; Yokohama: Kinema Kurabu, 2001.
High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931–1945.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Kawabata Yasunari. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Trans. Alisa Freedman. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005.
Snow Country. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. New York: Perigee Books, 1957.
LaMarre, Thomas. Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and “Oriental”
Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005.
McDonald, Keiko I. From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Film. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 2000.
Sakai, Cécile. Kawabata, le clair-obscur. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.
Tyler, William, ed. Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008.
Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Honolulu:
University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008.
Washburn, Dennis, and Carole Cavanaugh, eds. Word and Image in Japanese Cinema.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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 Bibliography

Modern drama
Goodman, David. After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University East Asia Program, 2003.
Japan Playwrights Association, ed. Half a Century of Japanese Theater. 10 vols. Tokyo:
Kinokuniya Shoten, 1999–2009.
Kano, Ayako. Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, Nationalism. New
York: Palgrave, 2001.
Kishida, Kunio. Five Plays by Kishida Kunio. Ed. David G. Goodman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University East Asia Papers, 2002.
Kubo, Sakae. Land of Volcanic Ash. Trans. David G. Goodman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East
Asia Papers, 1993.
Lee, William. “Chikamatsu and Dramatic Literature in the Meiji Period.” In Haruo
Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity
and Japanese Literature, 179–98. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Mori, Mitsuya, M. Cody Poulton, and J. Thomas Rimer, eds. The Columbia Anthology of
Modern Japanese Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Poulton, M. Cody. A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900–1930.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010.
Ridgely, Steven C. Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shūji.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Rimer, J. Thomas. Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1974.
Rolf, Robert T., and John K. Gillespie. Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992.

Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar period

Doak, Kevin. Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Gardner, William O. Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Goodman, David G. Long Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1901–1940.
Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989.
Guest, Harry, Lynn Guest, and Kajima Shōzō, eds. Postwar Japanese Poetry.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Hirata, Hosea. The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburō: Modernism in Translation.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Morton, Leith, ed. An Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1993.
Ōoka, Makoto, and Thomas Fitzsimmons, eds. A Play of Mirrors: Eight Major Poets of
Modern Japan. Rochester, MI: Katydid Books, 1987.
Ōoka, Makoto, and Paul McCarthy, eds. 101 Modern Japanese Poems. London: Thames River
Press, 2012.

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 Bibliography

Sas, Myryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Sato, Hiroaki, and Burton Watson, eds. From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of
Japanese Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Shiffert, Edith Marcombe, and Yūki Sawa. Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry. Rutland, VT
and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972.
Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–
1978). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.
Ueda, Makoto: Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Japanese Literature. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1983.

Trends in postwar literature, 1945–1970s

Cohn, Joel. Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 1998.
Dorsey, James, and Douglas Slaymaker, eds. Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and
the War. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton, 1999.
Furui, Yoshikichi. Child of Darkness: Yōko and Other Stories. Trans. with critical
commentaries, Donna George Storey. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 1997.
Gessel, Van. The Sting of Life: Four Contemporary Japanese Novelists. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989.
Gessel, Van, and Tomone Matsumoto, eds. The Shōwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short
Stories. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1985.
Hibbett, Howard, ed. Contemporary Japanese Literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Ibuse, Masuji. Black Rain. Trans. John Bester. New York: Kodansha International, 1981.
Salamander and Other Stories. Trans. John Bester. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture,
1945–1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Ishimure, Michiko. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. Trans. Livia
Monnet. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.
Kojima, Nobuo. Embracing Family. Trans. Yukiko Tanaka. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 2005.
Koschmann, Victor. Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Lyons, Phyllis. The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1985.
Mayo, Marlene, J. Thomas Rimer, and Eleanor Kerkham, eds. War, Occupation, and
Creativity. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
Minear, Richard, ed. and trans. Hiroshima: Three Witnesses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Trans. Fumi Komatsu. New York:
Knopf, 1971.
Nagai, Takashi. The Bells of Nagasaki. Trans. William Johnston. New York: Kodansha
International, 1984.

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Noma, Hiroshi. Zone of Emptiness. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Cleveland, OH: World
Publishing Company, 1956.
Ōe, Kenzaburo, ed. The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. New York:
Grove Press, 1985.
Orbaugh, Sharalyn. Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity.
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007.
Sherif, Ann. Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009.
Shimao, Toshio. “The Sting of Death” and Other Stories. Trans. with introduction and
interpretive comments, Kathryn Sparling. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies,
University of Michigan, 1985.
Slaymaker, Douglas. The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. New York: Routledge. 2004.
Takeuchi, Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Ed. and trans. Richard
Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Treat, John. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Vincent, Keith. Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.
Wolfe, Alan. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Yasuoka, Shōtarō. A View by the Sea. Trans. Kären Wigen Lewis. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984.
Yoshida, Mitsuru. Requiem for Battleship Yamato. Trans. Richard Minear. Naval Institute
Press, 1999.

Women’s fiction in the postwar era

Aoyama, Tomoko. “A Room as Sweet as Honey.” In Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza
Ramirez-Christensen, eds. The Father–Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the
Law of the Father, 167–93. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
Fujimura-Fanselow, Kumiko, and Atsuko Kameda. Japanese Women: New Feminist
Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future. New York: The Feminist Press at the
City University of New York, 1995.
Hartley, Barbara. “Writing the Body of the Mother: Narrative Moments in Tsushima
Yūko, Ariyoshi Sawako and Enchi Fumiko.” Japanese Studies 23, no. 3 (2003): 293–305.
Hulvey, S. Yumiko. “The Intertextual Fabric of Narratives by Enchi Fumiko.” In Steven
Heine and Charles W. Fu, eds., Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives,
69–224. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.
Jones, Gretchen. “Subversive Strategies: Masochism, Gender and Power in Kōno Taeko’s
‘Toddler-Hunting.’” East Asia: An International Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2000): 79–107.
Lippit, Noriko Mizuta, and Kyoko Iriye Selden, trans. and eds. Japanese Women Writers:
Twentieth Century Short Fiction. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1991.
Mizuta, Noriko, and Kyoko Selden, eds. More Stories by Japanese Women Writers. New York:
M.E. Sharpe, 2011.
Nagaike, Kazumi. Fantasies of Cross-Dressing: Japanese Women Write Male–Male Erotica.
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012.

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Napier, Susan J. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity.
London: Routledge, 1996.
Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Arguing with the Real: Kanai Mieko.” In Stephen Snyder and Philip
Gabriel, eds., Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 245–77. Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.
“The Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction.” In Paul Gordon Schalow and
Janet A. Walker, eds., The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s
Writing, 119–64. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007.
“Ohba Minako and the Paternity of Maternalism.” In Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza
Ramirez-Christensen, eds., The Father–Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the
Law of the Father, 265–87. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
Sakaki, Atsuko. “(Re)canonizing Kurahashi Yumiko: Toward Alternative Perspectives for
‘Modern’ ‘Japanese’ ‘Literature.’” In Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel, eds., Ōe and
Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 153–76. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
1999.
Schalow, Paul Gordon, and Janet A. Walker, eds. The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in
Japanese Women’s Writing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Schierbeck, Sachiko Shibata, and Marlene R. Edelstein. Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th
century: 104 biographies, 1900–1993. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1994.
Sherif, Ann. Mirror: The Fiction and Essays of Kōda Aya. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 1999.
Tanaka, Yukiko, and Elizabeth Hanson, trans. and eds. This Kind of Woman: Ten Stories by
Japanese Women Writers, 1960–1976. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
Vernon, Victoria. Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will and Social Constraint in Fiction by
Modern Japanese Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Viswanathan, Meera. “In Pursuit of the Yamamba: The Question of Female Resistance.”
In Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker, eds., The Woman’s Hand: Gender and
Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, 239–61. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1996.
Wilson, Michiko Niikuni. Gender Is Fair Game: (Re)thinking the (Fe)male in the Works of Ōba
Minako. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.

The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’ culture

Berndt, Jaqueline, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Manga’s Cultural Crossroads.
London: Routledge, 2013.
Hori, Hikari. “Views from Elsewhere: Female Shoguns in Yoshinaga Fumi’s Ōoku and
their Precursors in Japanese Popular Culture.” Japanese Studies 32, no. 1 (2012): 77–95.
Kitamura, Yuika. “Sexuality, Gender, and The Tale of Genji in Modern Japanese
Translations and Manga.” In Haruo Shirane, ed., Envisioning The Tale of Genji:
Media, Gender, and Cultural Production, 329–57. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008.
McLelland, Mark, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker. Boys Love
Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2015.

818
 Bibliography

Mechademia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006–. (Published annually.)

Nagaike, Kazumi. Fantasies of Cross-Dressing: Japanese Women Write Male–Male Erotica.
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012.
Prough, Jennifer. Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of
Shōjo Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
Rosenbaum, Roman, ed. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History. London:
Routledge, 2012.
Schodt, Frederik. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Tokyo and New York:
Kodansha International, 1983.
Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996.
Shamoon, Deborah. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012.

Modern Japanese literature from Okinawa

Bhowmik, Davinder L. Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance. London:
Routledge, 2008.
Hein, Laura, and Mark Selden, eds. Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and
American Power. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Mason, Michele, and Helen J.S. Lee, trans. and eds. Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context,
and Critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Molasky, Michael S. The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory.
London: Routledge, 1999.
Molasky, Michael S., and Steve Rabson, eds. Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature
from Okinawa. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.
Stewart, Frank, and Katsunori Yamazato, eds. Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in
Okinawa. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011.

Postwar Zainichi writings: politics, language, and identity

Scott, Christopher Donal. “Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar
Japanese Culture.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University Department of East Asian
Languages and Civilizations, 2006.
Wender, Melissa L. Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965–2000.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
ed. Into the Light: An Anthology of Literature by Koreans in Japan. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
Contemporary Japanese fiction
Birnbaum, Alfred, ed. Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction. New York:
Kodansha America, 1991.
Karatani, Kōjin. History and Repetition. Trans. and ed. Seiji Lippit. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012.
McKnight, Anne. Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Mitsios, Helen ed. New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.

819
 Bibliography

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan. Boston:
Cheng & Tsui, 2011.
Mizumura, Minae. The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Trans. Mari Yoshihara and
Juliet Winters Carpenter. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Murakami, Fuminobu. Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary
Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto
Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin. London: Routledge, 2012.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Random House, 2005.
Snyder, Stephen, and Philip Gabriel, eds. Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.
Wilson, Michiko. The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō: A Study in Themes and Techniques.
Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986.
Zimmerman, Eve. Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.

820
 Index

Abbot Rikunyo (1734–1801), 465 Ukiyo monogatari (Tales of the Floating

Abe Akira (1934–89), 736 World, 1661), 392
Abe Kazushige (b. 1968), 765, 767 Atsumori, 8, 336, 343
Abe Kōbō (1924–93), 701, 708, 709, 760 aware (pathos), 80, 138, 239, 299, 474, 486
Adachigahara, 339 Ayukawa Nobuo (1920–86), 717
akahon (red books), 510–22 Azuma nikki (Eastern Diary, 1681), 409
Akazome Emon, 135, 161, 170, 193–7 Azumakagami, 201
Akimoto Matsuyo (1911–2001), 708 azuma-uta (eastland songs), 77, 79, 82, 111
Akizato Ritō (?–1830), 524
Tōkaidō meisho zue (Illustrated Sights of Backpack Notes. See Matsuo Bashō
the Tōkaidō, 1797), 524–5 Bai Juyi (or Bo Juyi, J. Haku Kyoi or Haku
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), 286, 630, Rakuten, 772–846), 124
639, 669, 684, 694–5, 700 Baishi wenji (Collected Works of Bai Juyi,
ancient songs, 25, 26, 28–9, 37, 40–4, 52, 57–8, J. Hakushi monjū or Hakushi bunshū,
60; see also kiki kayō 839), 184–6, 283
Andō Tameakira (1659–1716), 138, 480 Changhen-ge (Song of Never-Ending
Shika shichiron (Seven Essays of Sorrow, J. Chōgonka, 806), 152
Murasaki, 1703), 138 Baitei Kinga (1821–93), 530
anime, 729, 764 bakufu (military government), 95, 201, 211–12,
Anzai Fuyue (1898–1965), 684, 714–15 215, 216, 295, 297, 309, 312, 314, 348–9,
aohon (green books), 510–22 374–6, 377–8, 388, 389, 393–5, 419, 432–3,
Aono Suekichi (1890–1961), 658–9 505–7, 520–2, 532–3
Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), 4, 461, 546 banka (elegy), 54, 63–4, 76, 77, 83
Arakida Moritake (1473–1549), 326 banzuke (theater programs), 391, 425, 452
Arakida Reijo (1732–1806), 377 Battles of Coxinga. See Chikamatsu
Arechi (Waste Land, 1947–58), 717 Monzaemon
Ariake no wakare (Partings at Dawn), 153–5 Ben no Naishi (c. 1228–c. 1270), 278
Arishima Takeo (1878–1923), 632, 653 Ben no Naishi nikki (The Diary of Ben
aristocrat, 4–6, 7, 8, 40–1, 71, 89–90, 102, 281–3, no Naishi, date unknown), 268–9,
289, 325, 334, 335–6, 343, 348, 373, 403, 272–3, 275
448, 471–2, 475–6, 653; see also chapters Benkei monogatari (The Tale of
7–19, 21–25 Benkei), 359
Ariwara no Narihira (825–80), 98, 99, 100, 115, benreibun (Chinese-style parallel prose,
123–5, 235, 277, 335, 337, 379 Ch. pianwen), 179
Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–84), 743 benshi (oral lecturer for silent film), 697
Asai Ryōi (c. 1612–91), 375, 398 Betsuyaku Minoru (b. 1937), 708
Tōkaidō meishoki (Famous Places of bibungaku (elegant writing or belles-lettres),
the Tōkaidō, c. 1661), 399, 447 565–6, 570

821
 Index

biwa hōshi (lute-playing minstrels), 9, 216, zange-mono, 419

290–3, 297, 302, 303–4, 308, 355, 363, in the ancient period, 15, 16–17, 20, 31,
373, 437 37–9, 58
Bōken Dankichi (The Adventures of Dankichi, in the Heian period, 214
1933–9), 677 in the medieval period, 214–15
Buddhism, 3–4, 7–9, 33, 158, 235 bugaku (court dance), 347
and bukan (samurai directories), 387, 627
dengaku, 331 buke-mono (books on warrior life), 418
Fujiwara no Kintō, 120 bundan (literary establishment), 729–30,
furyū, 448 760, 765
ganmon, 179–80 Bungakukai (Literary World, est. 1893),
Genji monogatari, 20, 136–7 603, 729
Gozan bungaku. chapter 32 Bungei jidai (The Literary Age, 1924–7), 630,
Gukanshō, 201–5, 298 695, 697
gunki, 213, 290 Bungei sensen (The Literary Front, 1924–32),
haikai, 403 630, 658–9, 664
Heike monogatari, 295, 299, 302, 303, 309 Bungo no kuni fudoki (Bungo Province
Ise monogatari, 160 Gazetteer), 47
kana hōgo, 399 bunjinga (literati painting), 410, 492
kanshi, 457 Bunka shūreishū (Collection of Exquisite
karon, 218, 253 Literary Flourish, 818), 88–9, 91
Konjaku monogatari shū, 100–1, 281 bunmei kaika (Westernization movement,
Korai fūteishō, 226–7 “civilization and enlightenment”), 583
kōwakamai, 362 bunraku, 391, chapter 43
kyōgen, 347, 349, 350–1, 352 Bunshō sekai (World of Writing, est. 1906), 570
Kyōgoku Tamekane, 244 Bunshō sōshi (Bunshō the Saltmaker), 358
kyōsha, 503 burakumin, 602, 650–1, 689, 760, 765
Man’yōshū, 66, 68, 69, 71–4 Busu (Delicious Poison), 349
Motoori Norinaga, 486 butō, 709
Nansō Satomi hakkenden, 549 byōbu-uta (screen poems), 99, 112–14, 119–20
Nihon ryōiki, 97, 281
nōgakuron, 341, 345, 346 Cao Zhi (192–232), 58, 70
noh, 331–3, 336, 350–1 censorship
otogizōshi, 358–61 and setsuwa, 284
printed texts, 382–3, 384–5, 386, 387, 389, in the Edo period, 348–9, 352–3, 374, 376, 380,
396, 398 388, 393–5, 440, 441, 444–5, 520–2, 523,
recluse literature, 259–67 532–3, 535
renga, 319 in the modern period, 573, 581, 625, 647, 656,
Ryōjin hishō, 207–8 661, 668, 706, 722, 723, 724, 748–9
Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi, 544 under US occupation, 700, 720–1, 724–7
Sarashina Nikki, 173–4 chaban (impromptu comedic “sketch”
sekkyō, 365, 367 performances), 525, 530
setsuwa, 281, 282, 283–5 Changhen-ge. See Bai Juyi
Shinkei, 322 Characters of Daughters in the World. See Ejima
Shinkokinshū, 230, 237 Kiseki
Shūishū, 119 Characters of Sons in the World. See Ejima
Shukke to sono deshi, 653 Kiseki
Shuten Dōji, 359–60, 368–9 Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–83), 445
Soga monogatari, 307 Chikamatsu Kasaku, 445
Sōgi, 323 Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), 4, 9, 10,
Towazugatari, 277 369, 375, 381, 429–33, 439–44, 513, 704
Uji dainagon monogatari, 282 Goban Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace,
Wakan rōeishū, 186 Played on a Go Board, 1710), 440

822
 Index

Kokusen’ya kassen (Battles of Coxinga, 1715), chōnin (townsman), 9, 138, 373, 377–81, 402, 405,
432–3, 442, 453 415–16, 462
Meido no hikyaku (Courier for Hell, chōnin-mono (books on merchant life), 418
1711), 442 Chōya gunsai (Collected Documents of the
Shinjū Ten-no-Amijima (Love Suicides at Court and Country), 180, 181, 192
Amijima, 1720), 432, 442 Christianity, 384, 393, 562, 564, 594, 599, 600,
Shusse Kagekiyo (Kagekiyo Victorious, 620–1, 654, 726
1685), 365, 438, 439 Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Nansō Satomi
Sonezaki shinjū (Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Clan. See Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin
1703), 440 Chronicles of Japan. See Nihon shoki
Yotsugi Soga (The Soga Heir, 1683), 439 Chūō kōron (Central Review, est. 1887), 630,
chikushi (“bamboo branch” verse), 462 643, 647, 666, 668, 679, 729
China. See also Tang, Song, Ming, Qing chūsei Nihongi (medieval Chronicles of
dynasties, Manchuria, Sino-Japanese Japan), 33
War, Second Sino-Japanese War class. See also aristocrat, burakumin, chōnin,
ancient texts imported from, 19–20 daimyō, farmer, jige, merchant,
and samurai, provincial governor
bunjin, 379–80, 503, chapter 50 and genre, 567
Daigakuryō, chapter 16 and language, 557, 593–4
haishi-mono, 539, 541 and writing style, 561, 569
Kogaku, 379 four-class system, 373–4, 415, 419–20, 435,
literary genre hierarchy, 3–4 553–4, 603
print culture in Japan, 389–90 in modern society, 582, 599, 603, 604, 643,
Sugawara no Michizane. chapter 8 646, 655–68, 683, 707, 723, 732–3, 735–6,
in 741, 745, 748
Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari, Collection of Myriad Leaves. See Man’yōshū
145–6 colonialism, 553, 582, 653, 666, 714–15, chapters
Matsura no miya monogatari, 151–3 69, and 71; see also Manchuria
setsuwa-shū, 9, 281, 283–4 and
influence on Japanese texts, 17–18, 26–30, Korea, 626, 638, 684
34, 39, 42, 45, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57–9, 61, Okinawa, 753–4
64, 67–74, 80–1, 85, 97–9, 121–2, 127, 157, Taiwan and the South Sea, chapter 70
179–81, 215, 218, 219–20, 281, 290, 411, zainichi literature, chapter 79
473, 479–84, 522; see also hentai kanbun, commoner, 5, 9, 97, 100–1, 129, 133, 164, 214,
kanbun, kanji, Kangaku, kango, kanshi, 215, 216–17, 282, 284–5, 286, 317, 318,
kundoku, kyōbun, kyōshi, wakan-kon- 319, 323, 350–1, 357–8, 404, 406, 408, 432,
kōbun, chapters 6, 17, 18, 32, 46, 47, 50, 433, 440, 449, 450, 469–70, 471–2, 475,
and 57 486, 507, 523, 528, 533, 563, 704; see also
influence on primary education, 389, 557–8 chōnin, jige
influence on state system in Japan, 17, 18, Confucianism, 3–4, 7–9, 158; see also Gion
36, 52, 59–60 Nankai, Hattori Nankaku, Ogyū
printing technology of, 382–3 Sorai, chapter 49
Chinese, literary. See kanbun and
chinkon (pacification of spirits), 293 Daigakuryō, 103, 178
chishi (geographical guidebooks to famous Edo kanshi, 457–8, 465, 466
sights), 524–5 Edo social hierarchy, 415
Chiun (d. 1448), 321 education in the Edo period, 384
Chōjakyō (1627), 400 education in the Meiji period, 558, 562–3
chōka (long poem), 6, 53, 54, 82, 112, 222, 231, fudoki, 48
275; see also references to individual Genji monogatari, 136–7, 138
poems in chapter 5 Gozan bungaku, 312
chokutō (imperial responses), 189 gunki, 290
Chong Ch’u-wŏl (1944–2011), 759 Hōjōki, 191

823
 Index

Confucianism (cont.) premodern aristocratic women, 151,

Honchō nijū fukō, 420 163, 172
Itō Jinsai, 416 women in the early modern period, 376,
Kaifūsō, 86, 87 390, 398
Kangaku, 379 women in the modern period, 588, 738,
Kashōki, 398 739, 748, chapters 61, 66
Kogaku, 379, 472 in
Kojiki, 26 the early modern period, 257, 373, 384,
Kokugaku, 472 389–90, 397–8, 416, 426, 457–8, 460,
kyōsha, 503 469–70, 483, 488, 572; see also terakoya
Man’yōshū, 68, 71–4 the modern period, 572, 576–7, 578, 590–1,
Meiji family ideology, 641 607, chapter 56
Mori Ōgai, 628 the premodern period, 7, 97, 184, 188,
Nansō Satomi hakkenden, 548–9 284, 373; see also Daigakuryō
Nihon shoki, 29–30 ehon (picture book), 390–1, 425
nōgakuron, 345, 346 kyōka-, 507
Onna daigaku, 376 -mono, 539–41, 543
printed texts, 384, 396, 398 nara-, 359, 362, 365
Saga anthologies, 90 Eifukumon’in (1271–1342), 246
samurai, 377–8 Eiga jidai (The Age of Film, 1926), 697
Sugawara no Michizane, 108–9 Eiga monogatari (Tales of Flowering Fortunes,
Taiheiki, 309–10 c. early 12th c.), 6, 84, 100, 135, 179, 298,
the notion of bungaku, 564, 565 chapter 19
Edo academy, 467, 469 Eiri Genji monogatari (Illustrated Tale of Genji,
in the ancient period, 15, 58 1640), 137
Eisai (or Yōsai, 1141–1215), 284, 311
Daidōji Yūzan (1639–1730), 496 Ejima Kiseki (1666–1735), 388, 415–16, 421–3,
daiei (fixed poetic topic), 232, 476 512, 513
Daigakuryō (Heian State Academy), 88, 90, 91, Keisei iro samisen (The Courtesan’s
96, 103, chapter 16 Shamisen of Love, 1701), 422
daimyō, 91, 217, 250, 374–6, 380, 394, 395, 450 Seken musuko katagi (Characters of Sons
Daiten (1719–1801), 492 in the World, 1715), 422
dance. See butō, bugaku, gigaku, kōwakamai, Seken musume katagi (Characters of
kusemai, shirabyōshi, noh Daughters in the World, 1717), 422
dangibon (satiric teachings), 380, 498, 503 Yakusha kuchi samisen (The Actor’s
Danrin haikai, 405–6, 413, 416–17 Hummed Shamisen, 1699), 421–2
Daruma-uta, 233, 251 Ekuni Kaori (b. 1964), 764
Dazai Osamu (1909–48), 670, 723, 724 Ema Saikō, 390
Dazai Shundai (1680–1747), 363, 483–4 emaki (picture scroll), 136, 214, 215, 292, 358–62,
dengaku (field entertainment), 216, 330–1, 334 365, 409
denju (secret transmission), 213, 252, emperor. See sovereign
373, 471–2 Emura Hokkai (1713–88), 91, 458
dōchūki (travel guides), 399 Enchi Fumiko (1905–86), 139, 646, 705, 740,
Dōgen (1200–53), 215, 284 743–4
Dōjōji engi (A History of Dōjōji Temple, Endō Shūsaku (1923–96), 760
14th or 15th c.), 360–1, 362 engi (record of temple origins), 38–9
dokugin (solo poetry composition), 407, 416 Engi shiki (927), 20, 33, 34
drama. See theater engi-mono (stories of divine origins), 215
Du Fu, 466 engo (word association), 405, 507
Engyō-bon Heike monogatari, 298, 301–3
Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965), 684, 733 Enokoshū (Puppy Collection, 1633), 391, 405
education enpon būmu (the one-yen book boom), 660–1,
for 666, 669

824
 Index

Essays in Idleness. See Yoshida Kenkō Fujiwara no Koretada (or Koremasa, 924–72),
Etō Jun (1932–99), 640, 720, 744, 761 119, 125
etoki Fujiwara no Masatsune (1170–1221), 235–6
as a function (the explanation of the Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), 6, 96, 100,
picture), 518–19 119–20, 134–5, 161, 170, 171, 172,
as a person (picture-storyteller), 216, 355 193–201, 283
e-zōshi (picture books), 510 Fujiwara no Michitoshi (1047–99), 180–1, 223
Fujiwara no Mototsune (836–91), 104–5
farmer (peasant), 109, 349, 375, 396, 456, 555, Fujiwara no Nagako (1079?–?)
644, 659, 667–8, 754; see also four-class Sanuki no suke nikki (Sanuki no Suke Diary,
system under class c. 1109, also known as Horikawa-in
fiction / prose fiction. See dangibon, gesaku, nikki, Emperor Horikawa Diary),
gōkan, hon’an shōsetsu, kokkeibon, 175, 268
monogatari, ninjōbon, novel, otogizōshi, Fujiwara no Sanekane (1085–1112), 182
setsuwa, sharebon, shōsetsu, yomihon Fujiwara no Shigenori (1135–88), 283
and genre hierarchy, 3–4 Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), 101, 136, 225,
and Japanese storytelling tradition, 9–10 228, 231–6, 239–40, 244, 256, 270, 301
film, 606, 684, 720, 730, 733–4, 759, 764–5, Korai fūteishō (Collection of Poetic Styles
chapter 72 from the Past, c. 1197–1201), 214, 225–7
fudoki, 15–16, 19, 20–1, 34–5, 36, chapter 4 Fujiwara no Taishi (or Kaya no in,
and setsuwa, 280 1095–1155), 223
and Taketori monogatari, 121 Fujiwara no Takanobu (1142–1205), 151
Fūgashū (Fūga wakashū, Collection of Fujiwara no Tameie (1198–1275), 155, 242–4,
Elegance, 1344–8), 246–7, 250; see also 248–9, 274
Hanazono, Emperor Eiga no ittei (The Foremost Style of Poetic
Fujin gahō (Ladies’ Pictorial, est. 1905), 642 Composition, c. 1264), 242
Fujin kōron (Ladies’ Review, est. 1916), 645, 663 Fujiwara no Tamenari, 197
fujin zasshi (women’s magazine), 645–7, 663–4; Fujiwara no Tameuji (or Nijō Tameuji,
see also girls’ magazine and manga 1222–86), 243–4, 319
Fujiwara no (Rokujō) Akisue (1055–1123), Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), 101, 124, 136,
224–5 142, 149–53, 157, 159, 174, 225–6, 227–9,
Fujiwara no (Rokujō) Kiyosuke (1104–77), 225 240–2, 244, 250, 251, 253, 271, 300–1, 320,
Fukurozōshi (Book of Folded Pages, 344, chapters 23, 25
c. 1157), 225 Eiga taigai (Essentials of Poetic
Fujiwara no Akihira (c. 989–1066), 97, 179–80, Composition, c. 1222), 214, 227–9
181, chapter 18 Maigetsushō (Monthly Notes, c. 1219),
Meigō ōrai (Akihira’s Letters), 188 227–8, 241
Shinsarugakuki (Account of New Monkey Okuiri (Endnotes, c. 1233), 136, 157
Music), 188–9 Fujiwara no Yoshifusa (804–72), 103–4,
Fujiwara no Ariie (1155–1216), 235–6 112–13, 114
Fujiwara no Chikatsune (1151–1210), 230 Fujiwara no Yoshinobu, 197
Fujiwara no Fuhito (659–720), 87, 122 Fujiwara no Yoshitsune (1169–1206), 230,
Fujiwara no Hamanari (724–90), 219–20, 221 231–2, 234, 236
Fujiwara no Ietaka (1158–1237), 232, 235–6 Fujiwara Seika (1561–1619), 458
Fujiwara no Keishi (fl. c. 1252–c. 1292) Fujiwara Shunzei no musume (c. 1171–after
Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki (The Diary of 1252), 270–1
Nakatsukasa Naishi, c. 1292), 275–6 Mumyōzōshi (Nameless Book, c. 1200–1),
Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041), 119–20, 135, 185, 137, 149–51, 153, 155–6
221–3 Fukazawa Shichirō (1914–87), 728–9
Shinsen zuinō (Newly Selected Essentials, Fukuda (née Kageyama) Hideko (1865–1927),
c. 1001–2), 120, 221–2 601, 643
Waka kuhon (Nine Grades of Japanese Fukuda Tsuneari (1912–94), 708
Poetry, c. 1009), 120, 222–3 Fukunaga Takehiko (1918–79), 728

825
 Index

Fukurozōshi. See Fujiwara no (Rokujō) translation of A Doll’s House, 597

Kiyosuke works by Yosano Akiko, 645
Fukutomi sōshi (The King of Farts), 358 representation in kabuki, 434–5
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), 554, 556, 557, Genji gaiden. See Kumazawa Banzan
562, 580 Genji kokagami (A Small Mirror of Genji, 14th
Funabenkei (Benkei at the Bridge), 338 c.), 137, 390
furigana (gloss), 385, 401 Genji kuyō (Genji Offerings), 137
furugoto (ancient words), 111 Genji monogatari. See Murasaki Shikibu
Furui Yoshikichi (b. 1937), 736 Genji shaku (Genji Explicated, 1160), 136, 157
furyū performance, 337, 338, 352 Genpei jōsuiki (The Record of the Rise and Fall
and kabuki, 448 of the Genji and Heike), 297, 298
Fushiminomiya Sadafusa, Prince (1372–1456), Genpei tōjōroku (The Record of the Genpei
250, 348 Battles, 1337), 297, 298, 303
Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), 568, 623–5, Genpei War (1180–5), 201, 202, 211, 216, 230,
chapter 60 288–9, 290–1, 336, 343, 358, 363, 439, 444,
Aibiki (1888 translation of Turgenev’s “The 540, chapters 30, 31
Rendezvous” from A Sportsman’s Genroku Taiheiki. See Miyako no Nishiki
Notebook), 589–92, 596 Gentō, 283
Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887–9), 562, 589, gesaku (playful writing), 380, 503, 560, 578–9,
592–6, 623, 688, 703 581, 582; see also dangibon, gōkan, kusa-
Futari daimyō (Two Feudal Lords), 351 zōshi, kokkeibon, kyōka, kyōshi, nin-
Fūyōshū (Fūyō wakashū, Collection of Wind- jōbon, senryū, sharebon, yomihon
Tossed Leaves, 1271), 155–6 Gidō Shūshin (1325–88), 313, 315, 316
fuzoku (folk song), 111, 207 gigaku (court dance), 347
Gikeiki (Chronicle of Yoshitsune), 211, 306,
gabun-tai (elegant classical style), 561, 571, 307–9, 439
589–90, 624 giko monogatari (neo-classical tale), 152, 155
gagaku (court music), 208, 342 Gion Nankai (1677–1751), 375, 462, 463,
gakumon (learning), 4, 565–6 490–1, 503
gazoku-setchū-tai (an amalgamation of elegant girls’ magazine and manga, chapter 77
and colloquial styles), 561, 569 Gōdanshō. See Ōe no Masafusa
Gekkai Genshō (1675–1763), 491 gōkan (bound illustrated books), 139, 377, 379,
Gekkōtei Shōju, 517 530, chapter 52
genbun-itchi (unification of spoken and written goryō shinkō (belief in vengeful spirits), 448
languages), 558, 561, 570–1, 580, 588, Gosenshū (Gosen wakashū, Collection of Later
591, 602, 637, 706 Gleanings, 951), 110–11, 117–19, 124–5,
Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Complete 126, 161, 229, 235
Works of Contemporary Japanese Goshūishū (Goshūi wakashū, Later Collection
Literature, 1926), 660, chapter 68 of Gleanings, 1086), 223, 225, 233; see
Gendai taishū bungaku zenshū (Modern also Fujiwara no Michitoshi
Popular Literature Collection, Gotō Meisei (1932–99), 736
1926), 660 Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), 653, 684
gender. See also women, sexuality Gozan bungaku (Literature of the Five
and genre, 97–100, 118, 149, 155–6, 165–6, Mountains), 183, 215, 457, 459, 504,
193–4, 377, 381, 528, 585, chapters 27, 54 chapter 32
and writing systems and styles, 97–100, goze (itinerant female narrator), 290, 306
196–7, 567 Great Mirror. See Ōkagami
in Great Mirror of Beauties. See Ihara Saikaku
Ariake no wakare, 153–5 Great Mirror of Male Love. See Ihara Saikaku
Futon, 596 Gukanshō. See Jien
Himitsu, 693–4 gunki (military chronicle), 297
postwar Japan, chapter 76 gunki-mono (warrior tale), 7, 101, 212–13, 286,
Torikaebaya monogatari, 147–9 chapter 29, 30, 31

826
 Index

Gusai (or Kyūsei, d. 1378), 318–20 Hasegawa Shin (1884–1963), 649, 704
Gyōjo (1405–69), 321 Hashida Sugako (b. 1925), 710
Gyōkō (1391–1455), 323 Hattori Bushō (1842–1908)
Gyokuyōshū (Gyokuyō wakashū, Collection of Tōkyō shinhanjōki (A New Record
Jeweled Leaves, 1313), 244–5, 250, 254; of Flourishing Tokyo,
see also Kyōgoku Tamekane 1874–6), 574
Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759), 375, 380, 460,
Hachimonji Jishō (or Hachimonjiya Jishō, 461, 483, 490, 503
d. 1745), 388, 421–2, 512, 513 Hayama Yoshiki (1894–1945), 656–7, 659
Haga Isshō (1643–1707), 416 Hayano Hajin (1676–1742), 410, 492
Hagio Moto (b. 1949), 749–50 Hayashi Fumiko (1903–51), 646, 684, 686, 689,
Hagiwara Kyōjirō, 713 690–1, 722, 740, 741, 744
Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), 622, 712–13 Hōrōki (Diary of a Vagabond, 1928–30),
haibun (haikai prose), 409–10, 418 646–7
haiga (haikai painting), 409, 496 Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1949–51), 687–8
haigon (haikai words), 403, 493 Hayashi Fusao (1903–75), 658, 659, 665, 666,
haii (haikai spirit), 379 668, 674
haikai (comic or popular linked verse), 11, 79, Hayashi Gahō (1618–80), 459
117, 164, 217, 237, 244, 255, 326–7, 377, Hayashi Kyōko (b. 1930), 728
379, 386, 387, 391, 396, 505, 508, 613, Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), 392, 458–9, 480
chapter 41; see also individual haikai Heichū monogatari (Tale of Heichū), 125
poets Heiji monogatari (Tales of Heiji), 290, 291–3,
and 301, 306
Ihara Saikaku, 416–21 Heike monogatari (The Tales of the Heike) 6,
Kagawa Kageki, 476 9–10, 62, 101, 211, 212–13, 283, 286, 333,
Kobayashi Issa, 412–14 335, 343, 373, 384, 438, 444, 462, 616,
Ōkuma Kotomichi, 477 chapters 29, 30, and 31; see also biwa
Ueda Akinari, 474, 499, 500 hōshi
haiku, 11, 435, 436, 564, 573, 613, 614, 617, 692; hentai kanbun, 283, 291, 306; see also kanbun
see also hokku and individual poets Hi no Meishi (1310–58)
and senryū, 508–9 Takemukigaki (Record of Takemuki, 1349),
haishi, haishi-mono (unofficial histories), 510, 268, 277–8
518, chapter 55 Hibino Shirō (1903–75), 667
Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari. See Higashi Mineo (b. 1938), 754
Sugawara no Takasue no musume Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–96), 423, 599, 603
Hana Sanjin (or Tōri Sanjin, 1791–1858), 530 Hijikata Hisakatsu, 679, 680–1
Hanabusa sōshi. See Tsuga Teishō Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–86), 709
hanashibon (collections of short comic Hino Ashihei (1907–60), 667, 686, 700
stories), 399, 524 Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), 663–4, 683–4,
Hanazono, Emperor (1297–1348), 245–7, 722, 740, 741–2, 744
249, 278 Hiraga Gennai (1728–80), 375, 381, 410, 434, 492,
hanka (envoy or response poem), 53; 497–9, 506
see also references to individual poems in Fūryū Shidōken den (The Modern Life of
chapter 5 Shidōken, 1763), 498
hanpon (woodblock printing), 52 Nenashigusa (Rootless Grass, 1763, sequel
Hanshu (History of the Former Han, J. 1769), 498
Hansho, 111), 19, 29, 151, 194, 283 Hirata Oriza (b. 1962), 707, 710
Hara Tamiki (1905–51), 726–7 Hirato Renkichi (1893–1922), 713
Harima no kuni fudoki (Harima Province Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), 643
Gazetteer), 46, 47 Hirose Tansō (1782–1856), 466
Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969), 576 Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968), 646, 720
Hasegawa Ryūsei (b. 1928), 717 Hiruma Hisao (b. 1960), 766
Hasegawa Shigure (1879–1941), 646, 705 Hisago (Gourd, 1690), 407

827
 Index

Hitachi no kuni fudoki (Hitachi Province Ichikawa Kansai (1749–1820), 467–8

Gazetteer), 20–1, 45–9, 74 Ichikawa Sadanji II (1880–1940), 705
hiyuka (metaphorical poems), 77, 83 Ichinotani futaba gunki. See Namiki Senryū
Hōgen monogatari (Tales of Hōgen), 301, 306, Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), 4, 138, 369, 375, 379,
544, chapter 29 381, 388, 396, 398, 399–401, 405–6, 532,
hōgo (vernacular Buddhist writing), 214, 603, 700–1, 704, chapter 42
285, 399 Budō denrai ki (Record of the Transmission
Hōhi-ron (A Theory of Farting, 1774, sequel of the Way of the Warrior, 1687), 419
1777), 498–9 Buke giri monogatari (Tales of Samurai
Hōjō Dansui (1663–1711), 419, 420 Honor, 1688), 415, 419
Hōjōki. See Kamo no Chōmei Dokugin ichinichi senku (A Thousand Verses
hokku (opening verse of a linked-verse Composed Alone in a Single Day,
sequence), 6, 11, 319, 403, 405–10, 1675), 416
411–13, 494 Honchō nijū fukō (Twenty Cases of Unfilial
and haiku, 508, 617 Piety in Our Land, 1685), 420
and senryū, 507, 508 Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who
hōmon uta (Buddhist song), 207–8 Loved Love, 1686), 419
hon’an (adaptation and naturalization), 494–5, Kōshoku ichidai onna (The Woman Who
500, 579–80, 582 Loved Love, 1686), 419, 700
hon’an shōsetsu (adapted fiction), 579 Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Man Who Loved
hon’i (poetic essence), 232, 239 Love, 1682), 138, 400, 417–18
hon’ya (bookseller). See publisher Nanshoku ōkagami (The Great Mirror of
hon’ya nakama (booksellers’ guilds), 388, 394–5 Male Love, 1687), 419
Honchō monzui (Literary Essence of Our Nippon eitaigura (Japan’s Eternal
Court, c. 989–1066), 90, 97, 178, 181, Storehouse, 1688), 400, 419–20
chapter 18; see also Fujiwara no Saikaku nagori no tomo (Saikaku’s Farewell
Akihira to Friends, 1699), 420
Honchō nijū fukō. See Ihara Saikaku Saikaku okimiyage (Saikaku’s Parting Gift,
Honchō shojaku mokuroku, 16 1693), 419
Honchō zoku monzui, 180, 181, 192 Saikaku oridome (Saikaku’s Final Weaving,
hon-kyōgen (independent kyōgen plays), 348 1694), 420
Horiguchi Daigaku (1892–1981), 714 Saikaku ōyakazu (1681), 417
Hōseidō Kisanji, 514, 520–2 Saikaku shokoku banashi (Saikaku’s Stories
Hoshino Tenchi (1862–1950), 602 from the Provinces, 1685), 420
Hosokawa Yūsai (1534–1610), 160, 212, 253–5 Saikaku yorozu no fumi hōgu (Saikaku’s
Hototogisu (Cuckoo, est. 1897), 642, 753 Myriad Scraps of Letters, 1696), 420
Hotta Yoshie (1918–98), 689–90 Seken munezan’yō (Mental Calculations for
Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han, c. 5th Surviving in the World, 1692), 420
c.), 29, 194 Shoen ōkagami (The Great Mirror of
hyaku monogatari (hundred tales), 283 Beauties, subtitled Kōshoku nidai
hyakuin (one hundred linked verse sequence), otoko, Another Man Who Loved
317, 319, 322, 325 Love, 1684), 418
Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Ikezawa Natsuki (b. 1945), 755
Hundred Poems), 376, 392, chapter 25 Ikkyū Sōjun (1394–1481), 215, 314–16, 504
hyakushu (one hundred poems on fixed Kyōunshū, 315
topics), 119, 232, 317 ikusagatari (battle tale), 297
hyō (memorials to the throne), 35, 179, 189, 190 Imagawa Ryōshun (1326–1420?), 212, 250, 309
Hyōhanki (diary of Taira Nobunori, mid-12th Imakagami (The New Mirror, c. 1174–5), 201
c.), 301 imayō (modern style songs), 299, 330,
chapter 20
Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993), 686, 727–8 imperial poetry anthology (chokusenshū), 5, 50,
Ichijō Kanera (or Kaneyoshi, 1402–81), 136, 53, 67, 80–1, 84, 85, 95, 97–8, 101, 124,
160, 252, 345–6 134, 155–6, 161, 213–14, 218, 256–7, 325,

828
 Index

chapters 6, 9, 13, 23, and 24; see also Izumi shikibu nikki (Izumi Shikibu Diary,
Fūgashū, Gosenshū, Goshūishū, c. 1008), 98, 165, 170–2, 273
Gyokuyōshū, Kin’yōshū, Kokinshū, Izumo no kuni fudoki (Izumo Province
Senzaishū, Shinchokusenshū, Gazetteer), 15, 21, 47–8
Shingoshūishū, Shinkokinshū, Izutsu, 335–6
Shinshokukokinshū, Shinyōshū,
Shokugosenshū, Shūishū Jakuren (c. 1139–1202), 232, 235–6
Inaka shibai. See Manzōtei jidai-mono (historical or “period” book), 422
Inbe no Hironari (fl. early 9th c.), 35 jidai-mono, jidai kyōgen (historical play), 378,
Indōshū. See Nakamura Saikoku 429, 432, 433, 439, 441, 703–4
Inoue Hisashi (1934–2010), 708, 709, 710 Jien (1155–1225), 232, 298, 300
Inoue Mitsuharu (1926–92), 728 Gukanshō (1221), 201–5, 298
Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944), 613–15 jige (commoner), 247–8, 250, 317, 321
Inu tsukubashū (Mongrel Tsukuba Collection, jige denju (commoner transmissions), 471
1532), 326, 403–4 Jinen Koji (The Lay-Priest Jinen), 332
Iratsume (The Maiden, est. 1887), 599 Jingū, Empress, 25–6
Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise), 5, 70, 79, 98, Jinmu, Emperor, 23, 25, 31, 32, 36, 41, 202
99, 100, 123–5, 126, 164, 214, 216, 235, Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831), 375, 381, 513, 517,
237, 321, 335, 337, 376, 385, 388, 389, 390, 522, 524–31
402, 480, 500, chapter 13 Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare, 1802),
Ishida Ira (b. 1960), 764–5 381, 507, 525–7, 531, 578–9
Ishihara Shintarō (b. 1932), 670, 732–3 Jitō, Empress (r. 686–97), 18–20, 29, 31, 59–62,
Ishii Shinji (b. 1966), 764 65–6, 83, 256
Ishikawa Jōzan (1583–1672), 406, 457, 458, 462 jitsuroku (true accounts), 445–6, 539–40,
Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), 722 542, 543
Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), 619, 624, jitsurokutai shōsetsu (fictionalized accounts of
625, 626 recent sensational events), 394–5, 585
Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–85), 668, 685–6 Jiyū minken undō (Freedom and People’s
Ishimure Michiko (b. 1927), 735–6 Rights movement), 554–63, 584, 585,
Issun bōshi (Little One-Inch), 358 586, 600, 643
Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), 584 Jogaku zasshi (Women’s Education Journal,
Itchū (1639–1711), 406 est. 1885), 562, 599, 641
Itō Baiu (1683–1745), 416 Jōgū Shōtoku hō-ō teisetsu (Imperial
Itō Hiromi (b. 1955), 718 Explanation of the Dharma Prince
Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), 379, 416, 458, 460, 479, Sagely Virtue [Shōtoku] of the Upper
480–1 Palace), 38
Itō Noe (1895–1923), 643–4 Jōkyūki (Record of the Jōkyū Rebellion), 291,
Itō Sachio (1864–1913), 618 293–4, 301
Itō Sei (1905–69), 657–8, 696, 722 Jomei, Emperor (d. 641), 56–9, 83
Itō Shizuo (1906–53), 716 jōruri, 9–11, 215, 356, 365–9, 377–9, 380, 421, 424,
Itō Tan’an (1623–1708), 462–3 426–8, 430, 431, 434, 513, 520, 524, 541,
Itō Tanboku (1680–1758), 528 542, 544, 547, 631, 706, chapter 44;
Itō Tōgai (1670–1736), 481 see also ko-jōruri
Iwade no Ben, 194 Jōruri jūnidan sōshi (The Tale of Lady Jōruri in
Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), 555, 702 Twelve Parts), 365, 368
Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942), 562, 599, 600, Jūjō Genji (Genji in Ten Chapters), 390
602–3 junbungaku (pure literature), 421–2, 566–7, 648,
Iwata Toyo’o (aka Shishi Bunroku, 654–5, 667, 699, 761–2
1893–1969), 668, 707
Izayoi nikki. See Nun Abutsu kabuki, 10, 11, 307, 329, 376, 377–9, 380, 391–2,
Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), 606, 609–12, 707 399, 405, 498, 512, 520, 522, 524, 529, 531,
Izumi Shikibu (fl. c. 1000), 98, 134–5, 144, 161, 535, 544, 547, 596, 604, 606, 692, 693,
172, 233, 331 702–6, 708, 720, chapters 43, 44, 45

829
 Index

kabuki-mono (eccentric outlaws), 448 diary, chapters 15, 27

Kada no Arimaro (1706–51), 484 Kana-no-kai (Kana Society), 558
Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), 472, 484 -majiribun (a style of writing reliant
kagai. See utagaki primarily on kana), 202
kagami-mono (mirror histories), 100, 201; Kanagaki Robun (1829–94), 519, 527, 531,
see also Azumakagami, Imakagami, 578–9, 585
Masukagami, Mizukagami, Ōkagami Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), 746
Kagawa Kageki (1768–1843), 476 kanajo (Preface in kana), 115, 157, 158–9, 220–2,
Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), 654 224, 226, 230, 341, 342, 346
Kagekiyo, 368 kana-zōshi (kana booklets), 376, 379, 418, 520
Kagerō nikki (Kagerō Diary, c. 974), 98–100, Kanbara Ariake (1876–1952), 620
161, 165, 168–70, 171, 174, 273, 278 kanbun (Sinitic prose), 1–2, 4, 19–21, 26, 27–9,
kagura (song/dance for the gods), 207 48, 69–70, 72, 77, 97, 102, 115, 157, 181,
kagura uta (shrine songs), 111, 117 190, 218, 219, 220, 221, 228, 230, 269, 311,
Kaibara Ekiken, 387 378, 379, 396, 501, 556, 557–8, 559–60,
Kaifūsō (Florilegium of Cherished Airs, 751), 561, 571, 574–6, 579–80, 582, 583, 616,
15, 16, 17, 19–20, 51, 68, 188, chapter 6 chapter 47; see also kanshi, kundoku
Kaikō Takeshi (or Kaikō Ken, 1930–89), and kokubungaku, 566–9
733, 760 and medieval warrior tale, 291, 292
Kaji Wataru (1903–82), 658 and setsuwa, 280–1, 283–4
Kakaishō. See Yotsutsuji Yoshinari diary, 165, 167, 273
kakekotoba (homophonic wordplay), 110, Kanehara Hitomi (b. 1983), 764–5
405, 507 Kaneko Mitsuharu (1895–1975), 716
Kaki Yamabushi (Persimmons), 353 Kaneko Yōbun (1894–1985), 658
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, 18, 51, 56, 59, 60–8, Kaneshiro Kazuki (b. 1968), 759
71, 72–3, 74, 76, 80, 83, 112, 494 Kangaku (Chinese studies), 4, 379–80, 457,
Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari, 296–300, 302–3 557–8, 616, 665
Kakyō hyōshiki (A Formulary for Verse kangebon (long preaching books), 544
Based on the Canons of Poetry, kango (Chinese words), 404, 567
772), 219–20 kanji (Chinese script), 187, 196, 385, 397, 517,
Kamichika Ichiko (1881–1981), 644 541, 557, 560, 569, 570, 625; see also
Kaminari, 347, 351 gender and writing systems and
Kamo no Chōmei (1155?–1216), 236, 248, styles, and writing system,
chapter 26 kanshi (Sinitic poetry), 6, 7, 10–11, 97, 112, 113,
Hōjōki (The Ten-Foot Square Hut), 8, 162, 120, 189, 215, 218, 220, 252, 316, 406, 411,
191, 202, 261–6 504, 635, chapters 6, 17, 46, 47, and 57;
Hosshinshū (Collection of Awakenings, see also kanbun, kanshibun, kyōshi
1216), 265 and aristocratic men, 5
Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), 3, 380, 472–3, and Edo literature, 378–80, 381, 390
475, 479, 484–5, 496, 499 contest, 118
Niimanabi (New Learning, 1765), 473 in the Meiji period, 564, 565, 613, 616
Kan Chazan (or Sazan, 1748–1827), 458, 465–6 kanshibun (Sinitic poetry/prose), 91, chapters
Kan’ami Kiyotsugu (1333–84), 216, 329, 331–4, 18, 47, and 57; see also kanbun, kanshi
335, 339, 340, 343 Kanwatei Onitake (1760–1818), 527
Sotoba Komachi (Stupa Komachi), 331–2 Kanze Nagatoshi (1488–1541), 338
kana (vernacular Japanese syllabary), 51, Kanze Nobumitsu (1435–1516), 338–9
97–101, 113, 187, 192, 193, 196–7, 204–5, kanzen chōaku (praising virtue, chastising
214, 306, 376, 384, 385, 391, 396–7, 504, vice), 480, 541, 543, 584
556, 557, 559–60, 711; see also gender and and Kyokutei Bakin, 546
writing systems and styles, Japanese Kara Jūrō (b. 1940), 708–9
literature, kanajo, kana-zōshi, Kara monogatari (Tales of China,
and writing system, 1 c. 1165), 283
and kokubungaku, kokugo, 3–4, 566–7, 570 Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941), 628, 640, 705–6

830
 Index

karon (waka poetics and treatises), 101, 120, Tsurayuki-shū (Tsurayuki Collection),
207, 214, 340–1, 344, 346, 476–7, 118–19
chapter 22 Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), 115
Karukaya (c. 1631), 366–7 kibyōshi (yellow cover illustrated books), 379,
Kasa no Kanamura (fl. 715–33), 65–6, 67, 380, 387, 454, 503, 504, 506, 513, 515,
75–6, 83 Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), 555
kashihon’ya (commercial lending libraries), kigo (seasonal word), 409, 412, 414, 508, 509
393, 513, 543 kiki kayō, 40, chapter 3
Kashiwagi Jotei (1763–1819), 468–9 kikigaki (lecture notes), 163, 281, 282
kasutori (pulp magazines), 721–2 kikō (travel writing), 266, 270, 410, 567; see also
katagi-mono (character books), 422, 529 travel
katari-mono (sung narrative), 356, 438; see also and Jippensha Ikku, 524–7
biwa hōshi, goze, jōruri, kōwakamai, kyōka kikōshū, 524–6
noh, sekkyō, sekkyō-bushi, sekkyō-jōruri Kikuchi Gozan (1769–1849), 468, 469
katei shōsetsu (family novel), 587 Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), 669, 692, 700, 706,
Katō Chikage (1735–1808), 473 707–8, 721
Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916), 554, 556, 564 Kikuchi Yūhō (1870–1947), 587, 692
Katō Umaki (1721–77), 499 Kim Saryang (1914–50), 672, 685
Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), 630, 669–70, Kim Sŏk-pŏm (b. 1925), 757, 759
695–6, 697–9 Kim Tal-su (1919–97), 689, 757, 758
Asakusa kurenaidan (Scarlet Gang of Kimura Akebono (1872–90), 600–1
Asakusa, 1929–30), 696, 698 Kimura Mokurō, 518
Kurutta ippēji (A Page of Madness, Kin Kakuei (1938–85), 758
1926), 695 Kin’yōshū (Kin’yō wakashū, Collection of
Yukiguni (Snow Country, 1935), 698–9 Golden Leaves, 1127), 224; see also
Kawaguchi Hiroshi (1905–?), 658 Minamoto no Toshiyori
Kawamura Minato (b. 1951), 687, 697–9, Kindai shisō (Modern Thought, est. 1912), 656
757, 759 Kindai shūka (Superior Poems of Recent
Kawamura Takeshi (b. 1959), 709 Times, c. 1209), 227–8
Kawatake Mokuami (1816–93), 378, 434, kindaishi (modern poetry), 753, chapters 63, 74
455–6, 531 Kingu (King, est. 1925), 649–50, 651–2, 663, 668
kayō (song), 40–1, 101, 206 Kinkafu, 111
kazura-mono (woman’s plays), 216 Kinoshita Chōshōshi (1569–1649), 472
keikobon (practice books), 391, 428 Kinoshita Junji (1914–2006), 707–8
Keikokushū (Collection for Ordering the State, Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885–1945), 624, 707
827), 88–9 kinpira jōruri (Edo-born subgenre of ko-jōruri),
keishū bungaku, keishū sakka (ladies’ literature, 356, 438–9, 440
lady writers), 599–604 Kinrai fūteishō. See Nijō Yoshimoto
keitai shōsetsu (cellphone novel), 766–7 kireji (cutting word), 409, 500, 508
Kensai (1452–1510), 325 Kirino Natsuo (b. 1951), 764–5
Kenshi, 134, 135 Kishida Kunio (1890–1954), 695, 697–8, 707
Kenshō (c. 1130–c. 1209), 225 kishu ryūri tan (story of the young noble in
Roppyakuban chinjō (Complaint about the exile), 123, 132, 450
Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Kitada Usurai (1876–1900), 600, 601
Rounds, c. 1193), 225 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–90), 684, 697, 715
Ki no Kaion (1663–1742), 441 Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), 237, 620–1, 711
Ki no Ohito (682–738), 68 Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705), 136, 391
Ki no Tadana, 189 Kogetsushō (The Moon on the Lake
Ki no Tsurayuki (d. c. 945), 66, 111, 115, 159, 165, Commentary, 1673), 138, 390
220, 232, 341 Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94), 602, 703
Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary, c. 935), 98, 100, 165, Kiyomizu monogatari, 398
166–8, 186, 268 Kiyotsune, 336

831
 Index

Kiyowara no Motosuke (or Kiyohara kokubungaku (Japanese national literature), 4,

Motosuke, 908–90), 124, 161 91, 565–70, 572, chapter 68
Ko no moto ni, 407 Kokugaku (nativist studies), 3–4, 33, 85, 101, 138,
Kobayashi Hideo (1902–83), 661–2 252, 379–80, 381, 387, 472–7, 556, 665,
Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), 375, 381, 412–14 chapter 49; see also Kamo no Mabuchi,
Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33), 710 Motoori Norinaga
kobunji (Ancient Phraseology, Ch. Guwenci), kokugo (national language), 3–4, 566–7, 569–70,
459, 465–8, 482, 483–4 572, 683
Kōda Aya (1904–90), 743 Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend,
Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), 423, 570, 585, 743 1887–98), 563, 564, 568, 580
kōdan (storytelling), 445, 455, 649, 651–2, Kokusen’ya kassen. See Chikamatsu
668, 706 Monzaemon
Kōdan kurabu (Kōdan Club, est. 1911), 649 Komaki Ōmi (1894–1978), 658–9
kōdan-mono (rumor works), 547 Kometani Fumiko (b. 1930), 747
Kogaku (Confucian ancient learning), 379, 472, Komparu Zenchiku (or Ujinobu, 1405–70?),
chapter 49 336–7, 339, 340, 343–6
Koganei Kimiko (1871–1956), 600, 602 Bashō (Plantain), 337
Kogetsushō. See Kitamura Kigin Rokurin ichiro no ki (Record of Six Circles
Kogo shūi (Gleanings from Ancient Stories, and One Dewdrop, 1455), 344–6
807), 35, 36 Komparu Zenpō (1454–1532?), 339
Kōgon, Emperor (1313–64), 246, 278 Komuro Angaidō (1852–85), 581
Koikawa Harumachi, 375, 520 Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now
Kinkin sensei eiga no yume (Master Past, c. 1120), 9, 39, 100–1, 197, 215,
Flashgold’s Splendiferous Dream, chapter 28
1775), 515, 520 Kōno Taeko (1926–2015), 740, 744–5, 746, 760
Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), 15–16, Korai fūteishō. See Fujiwara no Shunzei
18–21, 45, 47, 50–2, 55, 56, 101, 111, 379, Korean War (1950–3), 731, 742
473, 486, 487, 501, 665, chapters 2, 3 kōshō zuihitsu (antiquarian miscellanies), 545
Kojikiden (Transmission of the Records of Kōshoku ichidai onna. See Ihara Saikaku
Ancient Matters, 1798), 486 Kōshoku ichidai otoko. See Ihara Saikaku
Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006), 731–3, 740 kōshokubon (books on love), 399–400, 401
ko-jōruri (seventeenth-century jōruri puppet and Ejima Kiseki, 422
theater), 308, 356, 365–9, 438, 439, 440 and Ihara Saikaku, 418–20
Kōkami Shōji (b. 1958), 709 kōshoku-mono. See kōshokubon
Kokan Shiren (1278–1346), 383 kotobagaki (or kotogaki, headnote), 124, 138,
Kokin waka rokujō (Old and New Waka in Six 158, 166, 250, 254, 272, 320, 409, 410, 477
Quires), 78, 111–12 Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), 626
Kokinshū (Kokin wakashū, Collection of kouta (popular songs), 377
Ancient and Modern Poems, kōwakamai (ballad drama), 208, 213, 286, 307,
c. 905–14), 5, 6, 58, 66, 79, 81, 84, 86, 95, 308, 355–6, 359, 362–5, 366–7, 368, 369,
97–8, 99, 101, 124, 125, 164, 166, 214, 438, 444
219–22, 226, 228–9, 230, 237, 244, 250, Koyama Itoko (1901–89), 740
252, 323, 335, 341, 373, 376, 471, 473, Kubo Sakae (1900–58), 707
474–8, 493, 598, 617, chapters 9, 13 Kubota Mantarō (1889–1973), 707
Kokka hachiron (Eight Essays on Japanese kudaishi (poetry on fixed topic based
Poetry, 1742), 484 on line from earlier verse), 179,
kokkeibon (books of humor), 379, 381, 387, 503, 186, 190
507, 560, chapter 53 kuden (secret transmission), 281
Kokon chomonjū (A Collection of Things Kuga Katsunan (1857–1907), 563
Written and Heard in the Past Kujō Michie, 300
and Present, 1254), 282 Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91)
Kokubu Seigai (1857–1944), 576 Genji gaiden (c. 1673), 138

832
 Index

kundoku (a Japanese method of reading kyōshi (comic Chinese poetry), 379, 380, 470,
Chinese-character texts), 17–18, 26, 27, 503–6, 509, 613
33, 34, 100–1, 180, 557, 559–60, 561, 580, kyōyō shōsetsu (educational novel,
589–90 Bildungsroman), 654
Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), 624, 652
Kurahara Korehito (1902–91), 659, 665–7 Lady Ise (c. 877–c. 940)
Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005), 744, 745, 746 Ise-shū (Lady Ise Collection), 119, 166
Kurata Hyakuzō (1891–1943) Lady Kasa, 80, 98
Shukke to sono deshi (A Monk and His Lady Koshikibu
Disciples), 653–4 Ōsaka koenu Gon Chūnagon (The
kurohon (black books), chapter 52 Provisional Middle Counselor Who
Kuroi Senji (b. 1932), 736 Did Not Cross over the Hill of
Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862–1920), 586–7 Meeting), 140
Kurotobi Shikibu, 517 Lady Nijō (1258–?), 270, 278–9
Kuroyanagi Shōha (1727–71), 493 Towazugatari (The Unrequested Tale,
Kurumamochi no Chitose (or Chine, fl. c. 1306), 268–9, 276–7
720s–730s), 65 Lady Ōtomo no Sakanoue (c. 695–fl. until
kusa-zōshi (woodblock illustrated books), 401, 750), 65, 77, 84, 98
539, 542–3, chapter 52; see also akahon, leishu (Chinese encyclopedias), 20, 281, 282
aohon, e-zōshi, gōkan, haishi, kibyōshi, Levy Hideo (b. 1950), 766
kurohon Li Bo, 466
kusemai (a type of syncopated song and Li Panlong (1514–70), 482
dance), 332, 334, 362 logography/logographs (logographic
Kyō suzume, 399 writing), 17–18, 26, 28–9, 33, 37, 40, 51;
Kyō warabe. See Nakagawa Kiun see also kundoku
kyōbun (comic Chinese prose), 503, 506 love, See also kōshokubon, marriage, sexuality
kyōgen (comic theater), 11, 213, 216–17, 286, and
328–9, 335, 424, 426, 525, chapter 36 Buddhism, 7–8
kyōgen kigo (fictitious speech and ornate jōruri, 378
language), 137, 215 kabuki, 378, 449, 454
Kyōgoku house, 243, 246–7, 249–50, 275; see Meiji melodramatic fiction, chapter 62
also Kyōgoku Tamekane, Kyōgoku in
Tamenori Edo literature, 9, 532, chapter 54
Kyōgoku Tamekane (1254–1332), 243–5, 249, Funabenkei, 338
251, 254, 276 Genji monogatari, 129–32
Tamekane-kyō wakashō (Lord Tamekane’s girls’ manga, 749–52
Notes on Poetry, 1287?), 244 Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari, 146–7
Kyōgoku Tamenori (1227–79), 243 Heichū monogatari, 125
kyōka (comic waka), 191, 379, 380, 436, 509, 613, Imin gakuen, 602
chapter 51 Izumi shikibu nikki, 170–2
and Jippensha Ikku, 522, 524–6 Izutsu, 335–6
Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin (1767–1848), Kagerō nikki, 170
559–62, chapter 55 Katakoi, 694–5
Chinsetsu yumiharizuki (The Marvelous Kojiki, 23, 26, 42–4
Story of the Drawn-Bow Moon, Matsura no miya monogatari, 151–2
1807–11), 544–5, 546 Ningen shikkaku, 723
Keisei suikoden (A Courtesan’s Water Ōtsu Junkichi, 655
Margin, 1825–35), 522 political novels, 582
Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Chronicle Ryōjin hishō, 208
of the Eight Dogs of the Nansō Sagoromo monogatari, 140–2
Satomi Clan, 1814–42), 381, 393, Sotoba Komachi, 331–2
548–50, 561 Sumiyoshi monogatari, 150
kyōsha (mad person), 503 Takekurabe, 603

833
 Index

love (cont.) and 5; see also Kakinomoto no

Taketori monogatari, 123 Hitomaro, Ōtomo no Yakamochi
Torikaebaya monogatari, 147–9 Man’yōshū chūshaku (1269), 46, 84
Ukigumo, 592 Manchuria, 2, 638, 664, 666, 683–4, 688,
Utatane, 273–4 708, 715
Yoru no Nezame, 143–4 manga, 139, 677, 729–30, 764, 765, 767; see also
You xianku, 121–2 girls’ magazine and manga
zainichi literature, 757, 759 Manzei (fl. 704–31), 68
in works by Manzōtei (1756–1810)
Izumi Kyōka, 606–11 Inaka shibai (Provincial Theater, 1787,
Natsume Sōseki, 637–9 republished in 1802), 523
Tsubouchi Shōyō, 560 marriage
Yosano Akiko, 618–19 in
poems by Heian literature, 127–8, 131, 145–8, 150,
Ikkyū, 315–16 154, 168–70
Shimazaki Tōson, 616–17 Kojiki and Nihon shoki, 41–2
poems in modern period, 562, 592, 598, 601–2,
early Sino-Japanese anthologies, 90–1 607–11, 639, 655, 678, 727, 732, 738,
Gosenshū, 117, 118 745–6, chapter 66
Gyokuyōshū, 245 noh play, 335
Hyakunin isshu, 257–8 otogizōshi, 358
Japanese and Chinese, 108 the Edo period, 532, 548
Kokinshū, 116–17 politics in the Heian period, 5, 122, 124, 195
Man’yōshū, 51–2, 54, 55–6, 59, 62–4, 72–5, premodern practice, 269–70, 278
77, 78, 79; see also sōmon Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962), 624, 722
Myōjō, 618 Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), 478, 573, 617–18,
Shinkokinshū, 231, 232, 233–4, 241 635, 692
Shūishū, 117 Masukagami (The Clear Mirror, c. 1333–76), 6,
suicide (shinjū), 378, 451, 547, 647, 698 201, 212, 285, 304
and Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 10, 432, Matayoshi Eiki (b. 1947), 754
440, 442 Matsuda Masataka (b. 1962), 707
Love Suicides at Amijima. See Chikamatsu Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), 326–7, 391,
Monzaemon 404–5, 417
Love Suicides at Sonezaki. See Chikamatsu Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), 4, 64, 244, 266–7, 327,
Monzaemon 375, 379, 381, 406–13, 492
Lu Ji (261–303), 58 Nozarashi kikō (Skeleton in the Fields), 410
Lu You, 466 Oi no kobumi (Backpack Notes, 1688), 407
Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the
Machida Kō (b. 1962), 765 Deep North, 1694), 266, 410, 411
Maeda Ai (b. 1968), 561–2, 646, 682, 685, 706 Matsura no miya monogatari, 151–3
Maejima Hisoka (1835–1919), 557 Matsuura Rieko (b. 1958), 765
Mai no hon (Books of Dances, 1632), 364 Medoruma Shun (b. 1960), 754–5
Makura no sōshi. See Sei Shōnagon Mei Yaochen, 462
makurakotoba (poetic epithet, lit. “pillow Meigō ōrai. See Fujiwara no Akihira
word”), 56, 61, 81 meishoki (records of famous places), 398–9
Man Who Loved Love. See Ihara Saikaku meisho-zue (illustrated guidebooks), 399
Man’yō daishōki (An Apprentice’s Records on Meng Haoran, 459
the Man’yōshū, 1690), 84–5, 472 Meng qiu (J. Mōgyū), 283
Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves, merchant, 355, 356, 373, 375–6, 377–8, 392, 396,
c. 759), 5, 6, 9, 40, 88, 91, 98–9, 101, 415–16, 417, 418–20, 435, 442, 471, 482–3,
110–12, 114, 116, 118, 122, 124, 149, 151, 486, 489, 491, 499, 584, 632, 665; see also
212, 226, 231, 236, 379, 403, 471–3, 477, chōnin, four-class system under class
484–5, 487, 500, 617–18, 668, chapters 1, michiyuki (travel scene), 10, 299, 350, 428

834
 Index

Mikami Sanji (1865–1939), 565–7, 654 and

Mikohidari house, 149, 151, 225–6, 236, 240–7, genre hierarchy, 3–4, 378–9
346; see also Fujiwara no Ietaka, national literature, 567–9
Fujiwara no Shunzei, Fujiwara no nikki, 166, 170–1, 268–9
Tameie, Fujiwara no Teika, Jakuren, otogizōshi, 214, 357
Kyōgoku house, Nijō house, Reizei setsuwa, 39, 285, 286
house storytelling, 282–3
Mimasuya Nisōji (1785–1856), 455 vernacular histories, chapter 19
Minamoto no Michitomo (1171–1227), 236 warrior tale, 287, 289, 297
Minamoto no Sanetomo (1192–1219), 211, 212, monogatari sō (Buddhist priest-
228, 242, 289 storytellers), 215
Minamoto no Shitagō (911–83), 124, 126–7, Monokusa Tarō (Lazy Tarō), 358, 400
178–9, 180–1, 191 Montoku jitsuroku, 194, 197–8
Minamoto no Tamenori (d. 1011), 181 Mori Arinori (1847–89), 564
Minamoto no Toshiyori (c. 1055–c. 1129), Mori Kainan (1863–1911), 573, 576
225, 226 Mori Mari (1903–87), 744, 745
Toshiyori zuinō (Toshiyori’s Poetics, c. 1115), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), 567–8, 570, 600, 615–16,
207, 221, 223–4 619, 621–2, 682, 700, 701, 703, 706–7,
Minamoto no Tsunenobu (1016–97), 223, 225 chapter 64
Minase sangin hyakuin (Three Poets at Minase, Abe ichizoku (The Abe Clan, 1913),
1488), 325 627, 700
Ming dynasty, 312, 313, 381, 385, 390, 422, 467, Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), 568,
482, 483, 488, 494, 495, 497, 541, 559, 624, 682
561, 582 Omokage (Vestiges, 1889), 568, 615–16
Mishima Yukio (1925–70), 701, 704–5, 708, 733–4 Mori Shuntō (1819–89), 573, 574, 576
mitate (visual transposition), 110, 114, 405, 527 Morimoto Kaoru (1912–46), 707–8
Miyachi Karoku (1884–1958), 658–9 Morita Shiken (1861–97), 580
Miyajima Sukeo (1886–1951), 655–9 Motomasa (1400?–32), 339, 343
Miyake (née Tanabe) Kaho (1868–1943), Sumidagawa (River Sumida), 336–7
598–601 Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), 3, 138, 380, 387,
Miyake Kanran (1674–1718), 461–2 472, 473–4, 479, 485–7, 500–1
Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), 563 Ashiwake obune (Small Boat Parting the
Miyako no Nishiki Reeds, c. 1759), 474
Genroku Taiheiki (1702), 401–2 Isonokami sasamegoto (Whisperings from
Miyamasu, 337–8, 339 Isonokami, 1816), 474
Miyamoto Kenji (1908–2007), 665–6 Shibun yōryō (Essentials of Murasaki’s
Miyamoto (née Chūjō) Yuriko (1899–1951), Writings, 1763), 474
644, 720 Mozume Takami (1847–1928), 558
Miyazaki Muryū (1853–89), 581 Mugonshō (Silent Notes, 1603), 326
Miyoshi Jūrō (1902–58), 707 Mumyōzōshi. See Fujiwara Shunzei no musume
Miyoshi no Tameyasu (1049–1139), 181 Murakami Haruki (b. 1949), 670, 761–4,
Miyoshi Shōraku (1696–1772), 433, 443 766, 767
Miyoshi Tatsuji (1900–64), 716 Murakami Ryū (b. 1952), 761–2, 764–5
Mizukagami (The Water Mirror, Murasaki Shikibu (d. c. 1014), 98, 100, 134–5,
c. 1185–90), 201 137, 170, 184, 185, 331
Mizumura Minae (b. 1951), 766 Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), 5–6,
mokkan, 18 8–10, 70, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 112, 120,
Momonoi Naoaki (aka Kōwakamaru, 121, 123, 126–8, 164, 169, 172, 173–4, 176,
1393–1470), 213, 362 178–9, 193, 195–7, 214, 216, 236, 237,
Monmu, Emperor (r. 697–707), 59–60, 87 240–1, 268–9, 270, 273–4, 276–7, 285,
monogatari (vernacular tale), 5–6, 100, 101, 377, 321, 326, 343, 376, 390, 392, 418, 438, 450,
396, 486, 632, chapters 10, 11, and 12; see 474, 480, 486, 493, 500, 522, 567–8, 632,
also specific monogatari titles 700, chapters 11, 12, and 13

835
 Index

Murasaki Shikibu (d. c. 1014) (cont.) Nakamura Saikoku (1647–95)

Murasaki Shikibu nikki (Murasaki Shikibu Indōshū (Teachings Collection, 1684), 405–6
Diary, c. 1010), 99, 165, 172–3, 174, 195 Nakanishi Inosuke (1887–1958), 672
Murase Kōtei (1746–1818), 463 Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), 658, 659, 660–1,
Murata Harumi (1746–1811), 473–4 663, 720, 728
Murataya Jirobē, 524–5 Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki. See Fujiwara no
Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77), 707 Keishi
Muro Kyūsō (1658–1734), 460 Nakayama Kaho (b. 1960), 766
Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), 626, Nakazato Kaizan (1885–1944), 699
653–5, 721 Nakazato Tsuneko (1909–87), 740
music. See gagaku, kagura Namiki Gohei (1747–1808), 434, 453–5
Mutsuwaki (Record of the Battles Namiki Senryū (or Sōsuke, 1695–1751), 433,
in the North, 1051–62), 443–4, 445, 453–4
290–1, 297–8 Ichinotani futaba gunki (Chronicles of the
Myōjō (Venus, est. 1899), 618, 624 Battle of Ichinotani, 1751), 433, 444–5
myth, 16–17, 22, 34, 35, 36–7, 40, 42–4, Namiki Shōza (or Shōzō, 1730–73), 431, 445
121, 486, 560, 736 Nanakusa sōshi (The Seven Herbs), 358
and noh, 329, 338, 346 Nansenshō Somahito, 522
in Nanshoku ōkagami. See Ihara Saikaku
chūsei Nihongi, 33 Nansō Satomi hakkenden. See Kyokutei
fudoki, 46, 49 (Takizawa) Bakin
Kogo shūi, 35 NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio/All
Kojiki, 23–6 Japan Proletarian Artists’
Man’yōshū, 60 Association), 659, 660–1, 664, 666, 715
Nihon shoki, 30–1 Naruse Jinzō (1858–1919), 643
otogizōshi, 358 Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–84), 574–5
setsuwa, 284 nation, 175, 387, 393, 426, 435, 456, 457, 463–4,
477, 578, 582, 588, 607, 623, 625, 661,
Naba Kassho (1595–1648), 460 669, 670–1, 719, 726–7, 742, 744, 757,
Nagai Ai (b. 1951), 710 758, 761, chapters 56, and 69; see also
Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), 575, 621, 711–12, 722–3, colonialism, kokubungaku, kokugo
chapter 64 nationalism, 3–4, 106–7, 258, 472, 487, 648
Nagai Takashi (1908–51), 726 nation-state, 3, 598, 605, 627, 652, 699–700,
Nagata Hideo (1885–1949), 706 702, 735, 737–8, 753
Nagatsuka Takashi (1879–1915), 618 Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), 316, 576, 586, 612,
Nagawa Kamesuke (active 1772–89), 453 623, 632, 642, 692, 765, 766
Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–1961), 653–4 nature, 8, 10, 80, 378, 484, 502, 592, 656; see also
Nakagami Kenji (1946–92), 760–1, 765 season, kigo
Nakagawa Kiun and recluse literature, 262–6
Kyō warabe (1658), 398–9 in poetry, 63, 66–7, 81, 232, 269, 413, 461, 491,
Nakahara Chūya (1907–37), 716 508, 617, 716
Nakajima Atsushi (1909–42), 672, 678, New Flower Gathering. See Yosa (Yoza) Buson
680–1, 684 newspaper, 515, 554, 555–6, 557, 558–9, 563,
Nakajima (née Kishida) Toshiko (aka 574–7, 582, 599, 606, 612, 617, 637, 638,
Shōen, 1864–1901), 562, 600–1, 602 639–40, 642, 645–6, 647, 651, 659, 668,
Nakajima Utako (1841–1903), 599 672, 686, 697, 698, 719, 741, 754,
Nakamura Jūsuke II (1749–1803), 452 chapter 59
Nakamura Kichizō (1877–1941), 706 Nihon (Japan, newspaper, est. 1889), 563
Nakamura Masanao (aka Keiu, 1832–91), 554, Nihon bungakushi (History of Japanese
556, 580 Literature, 1890), 565–7, 654
Saigoku risshi-hen (1871 translation of Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei (League
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help), 554, for Proletarian Literature of
578, 652 Japan), 658

836
 Index

Nihon ryōiki (Record of Miraculous Events in Shinkū chitai (Zone of Emptiness, 1952), 724
Japan, c. 787–824), 39, 97, 100–1, 214, Nonoguchi Ryūho, 376
chapter 28 norito (prayers, liturgies), 33–4, 36, 60
Nihon shoki (or Nihongi, Chronicles of Japan, Nosaka Akiyuki (b. 1930), 722
720), 5, 15–17, 18–21, 45, 47, 50–2, 55, 98, novel, European, 4, 423, 430, 580; see also
101, 111, 121, 135, 194, 204, 285, 384, 473, shōsetsu
chapters 2, 3 Nukata, Princess (or Nukada, c. 627–after
Nihonjin (The Japanese, est. 1888), 563 690), 58–9, 64, 81, 98
Nijō house, 243–51, 253, 318, 324; see also Nun Abutsu (d. c. 1283), 243
Fujiwara no Tameuji (or Nijō Izayoi nikki (Diary of the Sixteenth Night
Tameuji), Hanazono (Emperor), Moon, c. 1283), 268, 269, 274–5
Hosokawa Yūsai, Nijō Yoshimoto, Utatane (Fitful Slumbers, c. 1265), 268,
Tonna (or Ton’a) 273–4, 278
Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–88), 249–50, 318–21, 326, Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Arts, est. 1928),
340, 343 646, 663
Kinrai fūteishō (Notes on Poetic Styles of Nyoraishi (or Joraishi, 1603?–74), 397–8
the Recent Past, 1387), 249 nyosho (books for women), 392, 398
Renri hishō (Treasured Notes on the
Principles of Linking, 1349), 320 Ō no Yasumaro (d. 723), 26–8, 32
Tsukuba mondō (Tsukuba Dialogues, Ōba Minako (1930–2007), 740, 744, 745–6,
1372), 318 747, 760
Tsukubashū (Tsukuba Collection, 1356–57), Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903), 478, 567–8,
319–20 615, 616
niku no kamiuta (deity song couplets), 207 Ochikubo monogatari, 127–8, 150
ningyō jōruri, chapter 44; see also jōruri Oda Jun’ichirō (or Niwa Jun’ichirō, 1851–1919)
Ninigi, 23, 25, 30, 60 Karyū shun’wa (A Romance of Cherries and
ninjōbon (books of sentiment and romance), Willows, 1878), 580–1, 582, 591
377, 381, 387, 513, 530, 560, chapter 54 Oda Makoto (1932–2007), 728
Nintoku, Emperor, 23, 26, 41, 42–4, 55 Oda Sakunosuke (1913–47), 721–2, 724
Nise monogatari, 402 Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), 670, 733, 734–5, 757–8,
Nise Murasaki. See Ryūtei Tanehiko 760, 761–2, 766
Nishi Amane (1829–97), 554, 564, 702 Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111), 181–2
Nishimura Shigeki (1828–1902), 554 Gōdanshō (Ōe Conversations, c. 1108),
Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), 714 178–9, 182, 281–2
Nishiyama Sōin (1605–82), 405, 406, 417 Gōke shidai (Proceedings of the Ōe
Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), 564, 678 House), 182
Niwa Fumio (1904–2005), 668 Ōe no Masahira (952–1012), 191, 194
Noda Hideki (b. 1955), 709–10 Ogawa Yōko (b. 1962), 763–4
nōgakuron (noh drama treatises). chapter 35 Ōgishō (Poetic Profundities, c. 1144), 224–5
Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985), 639, 642, 705, 720 Oguma Hideo (1901–40), 716–17
Noguchi Neisai (1867–1905), 576 Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), 4, 379–80, 381, 459–60,
Noguchi Takehiko (b. 1937), 629 465–7, 479, 481–5, 487, 489–90, 495, 503
noh, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 75, 198, 208, 213, 215–17, 237, Ōjin, Emperor, 23, 26, 41
255, 286, 308–9, 314, 348–9, 355, 366, 379, Ōjōyōshū (Essentials of Salvation,
385, 429, 545, 702, chapters 34, and 35 c. 984–85), 214
and Oka Seibei Kiyotoshi, 438
Genji monogatari, 137–8 Okada Toshiki (b. 1973), 710
kabuki, 428 Okada Yachiyo (1883–1962), 705
ko-jōruri, 366 Ōkagami (The Great Mirror, c. 12th c.), 6, 100,
kōwakamai, 362 193, 197–201, 202, 282, 285, 298
kyōgen, 347–8, 349–51, 352, 354 Okakura Kakuzō (aka Tenshin, 1862–1913), 564
otogizōshi, 355 Oku no hosomichi. See Matsuo Bashō
Noma Hiroshi (1915–91), 722, 724, 730–1 Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767–1837), 468–9

837
 Index

Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), 555 Paekche, 17, 31, 68–9, 81

Ōkuma Kotomichi (1798–1868), 476–7 painting, 6, 110, 111, 215, 313, 314, 316, 355, 473,
Ōkuma Nobuyuki (1893–1977), 662 489, 493–4, 496–7; see also bunjinga,
Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), 653 byōbu-e, emaki, haiga, shasei, ukiyo-e
Ōnin War (1467–77), 212, 217, 249, 252, 314, 323, Parhae, 91, 105
336, 338, 345 phonography/phonographs (phonographic
Onna chōhōki (Record of Treasures for writing), 17–18, 26–7, 29, 33, 37, 40, 42,
Women), 376 44, 48, 51; see also kana
Onna daigaku (Women’s Great Learning), 376 Pillow Book. See Sei Shōnagon
Ōno Kazuo (1906–2010), 709 pleasure quarters, 399, 405, 415, 418–19, 422,
Ono no Komachi, 99, 115, 144, 332 448–9, 450, 453, 454, 506, 523, 532–3, 534,
Ōnuma Chinzan (1818–91), 573–4 538, 584, 628
Ōoka Shōhei (1909–88), 687, 725–6 poetry. See ancient songs, haikai, haiku, kan-
ōrai-mono (textbook containing model letters shi, kindaishi, kyōka, kyōshi, renga,
for various occasions), 181, 396, 526 sedōka, waka
oral performance, 9–10, 11, 42, 59, 194, 284, 355, and genre hierarchy, 3–4
430, 431, 434, 437, 523–4. See also benshi, Priest Bunshi Genshō (1555–1620), 459
katari-mono, kōdan, norito, otoshi-bana- Priest Gensei (1623–68), 458, 462
shi, rakugo, sekkyō, sekkyō-bushi, Priest Keichū (1640–1701), 84–5, 138, 472
sekkyō-jōruri, song, storytelling, Priest Keikai (or Kyōkai), 39, 97
theater Priest Mujū
Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), 20–1, 132 Shasekishū (Tales of Sand and Pebbles,
Ōsaka koenu Gon Chūnagon. See Lady 1279–83), 281, 349
Koshikibu provincial governor, 5, 35, 46, 47, 72, 96, 99,
Osaki Midori (1896–1971), 705 109, 130, 134, 166, 189
Osana Genji (Child Genji, 1665), 376 publisher, 356–7, 375, 376, 380, 417–18, 428,
Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), 705–7 434–5, 439, 447–8, 469, 494, 524–5,
Ōshiro Tatsuhiro (b. 1925), 753–4, 755 527–8, 529–30, 535–6, 543, 547, 555–6,
Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), 644 570, 582, 606, 611, 631, 639–40, 696, 721,
Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823), 411, 436, 470, 495, 722, 724–7, 729–30, 767, chapters 39
504–5, 506, 523 and 40; see also Hachimonji Jishō,
Ōta Shōgo (1939–2007), 709 Murataya Jirobē
Ōta Yōko (1906–63), 726 puppet theater. See bunraku, jōruri, ningyō
Otogi bunko (The Companion Library), 356–7 jōruri
otogizōshi (Muromachi tale), 213, 215, 400, 723,
chapter 37 Qing dynasty, 466, 494, 497, 545, 559, 561, 572,
and 574, 575–6
kōwakamai, 363
monogatari, 214 Rai San’yō (1780–1832), 463, 469–70
noh, 355, 360–1 Nihon gaishi (An Unofficial History of
setsuwa, 286, 355, 360–1 Japan, 1827), 470
Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718?–85), 50, 52, 64, 65, rakugo, 455, 523, 530, 706
75–84 rakuji, 399
otoshi-banashi (comic oral storytelling), Rangaku (Dutch Studies), 579
523–5, 527 Record of Ancient Matters. See Kojiki
Ōya Sōichi (1900–70), 646 Record of Miraculous Events in Japan. See Nihon
Ōyodo Michikaze (1639–1707), 417 ryōiki
Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903), 570, 585, 587, Reizei house, 225, 243, 247, 250, 251–2, 318;
600, 623 see Reizei Tamesuke, Reizei
Konjiki yasha (The Golden Demon, Tamehide, Reizei Tamekazu
1897–1902), 606–9, 612 Reizei Tamehide (d. 1372), 247
Ozaki Shirō (1898–1964), 697 Reizei Tamekazu (1486–1549), 253
Ozawa Roan (1723–1801), 474–5 Reizei Tamesuke (1263–1328), 243, 244, 319

838
 Index

rekishi monogatari (historical tale), 193, 298 Saitō Ren (b. 1940), 709
religion. See Buddhism, Christianity, Sakaguchi Ango (1906–55), 688–9, 722,
Confucianism, myth, Taoism, Shinto 723–4, 725
renga (linked verse), 119, 212, 213, 214, 215–17, Sakaki Hyakusen (1697–1752), 496
224, 235, 237, 249, 252–3, 255, 266, 269, Sakate Yōji (b. 1962), 710
272, 314, 335, 340, 346, 355, 396, 613, 617, Sakazaki Shiran (1853–1913), 581
chapter 33 Sakiyama Tami (b. 1954), 755
and Genji monogatari, 137–8 Sakurada Jisuke (1734–1806), 454
and haikai, 403–5 Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi. See Santō
Renri hishō. See Nijō Yoshimoto Kyōden
Ri Kaisei (b. 1935), 670, 757–9, 765 samurai/warrior, 7, 8, 11, 97, 137, 211–13, 250,
Rikkokushi (Six National Histories), 32, 193 256, 285, 289, 323, 349, 352–3, 362, 363,
risshi (eight-line “regulated poems,” Ch. 373–5, 377–9, 380, 381, 389, 392, 393–4,
lüshi), 186, 189, 460 397, 406, 426, 450, 471, 472, 482–3, 491,
rōei (chanting of poetry in Chinese), 186–7, 503, 505–6, 532, 553–4, 555, 603, 641, 665;
299; see also Wakan rōeishū see also chapters 30 and 31
Rokujō house, 149, 151, 224–6, 236, 346; see also San’yūtei Enchō (1839–1900), 531
Fujiwara no (Rokujō) Akisue, Kaidan botan dōrō (A Ghost Story: Peony
Fujiwara no Ariie, Fujiwara no Lantern, 1886), 589–90
(Rokujō) Kiyosuke, Kenshō sandaishū (first three imperial poetry
Roppyakuban chinjō. See Kenshō anthologies, c. 905–1007), 111; see also
Roppyakuban uta-awase (The Six-Hundred Gosenshū, Kokinshū, Shūishū
Round Poetry Contest, c. 1193–4), 136, Sandō. See Zeami Motokiyo
225, 232 Sanemori, 336
Ruijū fusenshō (late 11th/early 12th c.), 20, Sanetaka kōki. See Sanjōnishi Sanetaka
46, 176 Sangoku denki (Transmissions from Three
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), 553, 564, 569, Countries, early 15th c.), 283–4, 355
570, 623, 625, 649, 693, 714 Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537), 252–3
Ryō no gige (833), 20 Sanetaka kōki (1470s–1509), 304
Ryō no shūge (late 9th/early 10th c.), 20 sanjūrokkasen (thirty-six poet-sages), 120
Ryōjin hishō (Secret Selections of [Songs to Sankashū. See Saigyō
make] the Dust on the Rafters Sanshō Dayū (c. 1639), 366
[Dance], 1179), 101, chapter 20 Santi shi (Song Dynasty Anthology of Tang
Ryōkan (1758–1831), 381, 476 Poetry “in Three Forms,” J.
Ryōunshū (Cloud-Topping Collection, 814), Santaishi), 316
88–9, 90 Santō Kyōden (1761–1816), 375, 388, 517, 520–2,
Ryūtei Rijō (d. 1841), 527, 529, 530 527, 528, chapter 55
Ryūtei Tanehiko (1783–1842), 139, 520, 522, 547 Chūshin suikoden (The Loyal Retainer’s
Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (Fake Murasaki’s Water Margin, 1799–1801), 541, 542–3
Bumpkin Genji, 1829–42), 139, 522 Mukashigatari inazuma byōshi (The Straw
Sandal, 1806), 544
sabi (withered, melancholy beauty), 216, Nishiki no ura (Behind the Brocade,
265, 461 1791), 528
Saemon Gorō, 331, 332, 339 Sakurahime zenden akebono sōshi (Book of
Sagoromo monogatari. See Senji the Dawn: The Unexpurgated Story
saibara, 112, 116, 207–8, 330 of Sakurahime, 1805), 543–4, 549
Saigō Takamori (1828–77), 584 Santō Kyōzan, 357, 510–15, 517
Saigyō (1118–90), 232, 248, 277, 331, 406, 411, Sanuki no Suke nikki. See Fujiwara Nagako
chapter 26 Sarashina nikki. See Sugawara no Takasue no
Sankashū (Collection of a Mountain musume
Home), 259, 260 Saru Genji zōshi, 400
saimon (prayers), 189 sarugaku, 216, 330–1, 333, 340–1, 343, 345, 346, 363;
Saitō Mokichi (1882–1953), 618 see also noh, kyōgen

839
 Index

Sasamegoto. See Shinkei Senzaishū (Senzai wakashū, Collection of

Sata Ineko (1904–98), 647, 663–4, 740 a Thousand Years, 1188), 101, 226, 232,
Satō Haruo (1892–1964), 678, 679–80, 684, 694 301; see also Fujiwara no Shunzei
Satō Makoto (b. 1943), 708 Sesonji Koreyuki (d. 1175), 136, 157, 271
Satomura Jōha (1524–1602), 326 Sesson Yūbai (1290–1346), 312–13
season, 10, 112, 162–3, 262–3, 264, 343, 378, 496; setsuwa (anecdotes), 5, 9, 10, 38, 39, 100–1, 182,
see also kigo 197, 213, 214, 215, 224, 259, 349, 355, 399,
in poetry, 54, 67, 78, 81, 86, 99, 108, 112, 114, chapter 28
116–17, 119, 186, 231, 237, 239, 269, 319, and otogizōshi, 286, 355, 360–1
413, 461, 506, 617 and warrior tale, 286, 289, 291, 292, 298–9
Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), 667, Seventh Diary. See Kobayashi Issa
686, 699 sewa-mono (contemporary-life play), 378,
sedōka (repeating-head poem), 53–4, 78, 433, 451
222, 231 and Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 432, 439,
Segawa Jokō III (1806–81), 455–6 441–2, 704
Sei Shōnagon (d. early 11th c.), 96, 98, 172 sexuality. See also gender
Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book, c. 1005), and
96, 98, 99, 120, 150, 174, 184, 207, 254, kabuki, 428
391, chapter 14 kasutori magazines, 721–2
Seiami (or Iami, Jōami), 333, 336 postwar translations, 722
seiji shōsetsu (political novel), 558–9, 560, 561–2, homosexuality in
576, 585, 586, 600–1, chapter 58 Torikaebaya monogatari, 149
seirei (spiritualist or native sensibility), works by Mishima Yukio, 734
462–3, 467 works by Ōe Kenzaburō, 734
Seitō (Bluestockings, est. 1911), 642–3 in
Sekai kōmoku (A Guide to Historical Akirame, 642–3
Settings), 431 Ariake no wakare, 153–5
Seken munezan’yō. See Ihara Saikaku girls’ manga, 750–2
Seken musuko katagi. See Ejima Kiseki Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari, 146–7
Seken musume katagi. See Ejima Kiseki Honchō monzui, 192
Sekine Hiroshi (1924–94), 717 Ikkyū’s poems, 315–16
sekkyō, sekkyō-bushi (sermon ballad), 10, senryū, 508
213, 215, 286, 355, 356, setsuwa, 285
365–9, 438 Shunshoku umegoyomi, 534–5
sekkyō-jōruri (ballad sung to shamisen works by Ihara Saikaku, 417–19
accompaniment), 215 works by Ōe Kenzaburō, 734
Semimaru (early Heian?), 277 works by postwar women writers,
Senda Koreya (1904–94), 708 744–5, 765
Sendai kuji hongi (Ancient Matters and works by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 629–30,
Fundamental Records of Early 632–3
Ages), 36 Shaku Nihongi (13th c.), 33, 46
Sengaku (b. 1203), 84–5 sharebon (books of wit and fashion), 375–6, 379,
Sengohyakuban uta-awase (The Poetry 380, 381, 387, 503, 506, 520, 522, 523, 525,
Match in Fifteen Hundred 528, 532–3, 540–1
Rounds, 1201–3), 232 shasei (sketching), 617–18, 692
Senji (d. 1092) Shasekishū. See Priest Mujū
Sagoromo monogatari (The Tale of Shiba Shirō (aka Tōkai Sanshi, 1852–1922)
Sagoromo, late 11th c.), 101, 140–2, Kajin no kigū (Chance Meetings with
143, 144, 149–50, 158, 276 Beautiful Women, 1885–8, 1891,
senmyō (vernacular proclamations), 33–4 1897), 561, 576, 582
senryū (satiric haiku), 379, 380, 413, 503, 504, Shiba Zenkō, 520
505–6, 507–9, 613 Shibaki Yoshiko (1914–91), 740

840
 Index

Shibu kassenjō-bon (The Four Part Battle Shinchokusenshū (Shinchokusen wakashū, New
Account), 303 Imperially Commissioned Collection,
Shibun yōryō. See Motoori Norinaga 1235), 227, 232, 240–2, 256, 300; see also
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928–87), 722 Fujiwara no Teika
Shichidaiki (Record of Seven Lifetimes, shingeki (modern theater), 11, 642, chapter 73
771), 38 Shingoshūishū (Shingoshūi wakashū, New Later
Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, Collection of Gleanings, 1384), 318;
1954), 700 see also Nijō Yoshimoto
shiden-mono (historical work) Shinjū Ten-no-Amijima. See Chikamatsu
and Kyokutei Bakin, 544–6, 547–8 Monzaemon
and Santō Kyōden, 544 Shinkei (1406–75), 321–5
Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), 626, 653, 655, 659, 720, Sasamegoto (Murmured Conversations,
723, 757 1463), 322
Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), 564, 677 Shinkokinshū (Shinkokin wakashū, New
Shigeshige yawa. See Tsuga Teishō Collection of Ancient and Modern
Shigyoku (1383–1463), 345–6 Poems, c. 1205–21), 101, 134, 214, 226,
Shiina Rinzō (1911–73), 688 227, 229, 238, 240–1, 248, 250, 256, 317,
Shiji (Historical Records, J. Shiki), 3, 19, 29, 319, 411, 474, 484, 487, 620, chapter 23;
180–1, 283 see also Fujiwara no Teika
Shijing (Classic of Poetry, 600 BCE), 58, 86, shinpa theater, 606, 692, 704–5
115, 157, 219, 220–1, 318, 481, 482, Shinran (1173–1262), 214, 653–4
484, 489 Shinsarugakuki. See Fujiwara no Akihira
Shika shichiron. See Andō Tameakira Shinsen jikyō (Newly Selected Mirror of
shikashū (personal waka poetry collection), Characters, 893), 113
165, 239 Shinsen kisōki (Newly Selected Record of
Shikisanban (the three noh ritual pieces), Scapulamancy), 35
329–31 Shinsen man’yōshū (New Selections of Myriad
Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), 375, 381, 527–31, 547, Leaves, c. 893–913), 113
560, 589–90 Shinsen rōeishū (New Selection of Poems to
Ukiyo-buro (Bathhouse of the Floating Sing, c. 1116–22, alt. 1122–33), 185
World, 1813), 527–9 Shinsen Tsukubashū (The New Tsukuba
Ukiyo-doko (Barber of the Floating World, Collection, 1495), 325
1813), 529–30 Shinsen zuinō. See Fujiwara no Kintō
shiku no kamiuta (deity song quatrains), 207 Shinshokukokinshū (Shinshokukokin wakashū,
Shimada Masahiko (b. 1961), 762, 765 New Later Collection of Ancient and
Shimaki Akahiko (1876–1926), 618 Modern Times, 1439), 250
Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918), 571, Shintaishishō (Selection of New-Style Poems,
596–7, 705 1882), 613–15
Shimao Toshio (1917–86), 731–2 Shinto, 160, 208, 282, 396, 477, 484
Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), 602, 616–17, 624 Shinzō Inu tsukubashū (New Mongrel Tsukuba
Hakai (Broken Commandment, 1906), 602, Collection, 1643), 404–5
650–2, 653 shirabyōshi (“white beat” singers), 206,
Wakanashū (Young Herbs, 1897), 616–17 208, 295
Yoake-mae (Before the Dawn, 1929–35), Shiraishi Kazuko (b. 1931), 717
665–6 Shirakaba (White Birch, est. 1910), 626,
Shimizu Shikin (1868–1933), 562, 601, 602 653–4, 655
Shimoda Utako (1854–1936), 643 Shirakawa kikō. See Sōgi
Shin Rotei (or Kantōbē, Akasukabē, shishōsetsu (watakushi shōsetsu, I-novel), 175,
d. 1816), 527 655, 682–3
Shin’yōshū (Shin’yō wakashū, Collection of and zainichi literature, 756–8
New Leaves, 1381), 246 shiwa (“talks on poetry”), 469
shinbun shōsetsu (newspaper novel), 612, 637; shōdō (preaching), 180, 292, 303, 306
see also chapter 59 on newspaper serials Shoen ōkagami. See Ihara Saikaku

841
 Index

Shōji ni-nen shodo hyakushu (First Set of Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), 3, 4, 553, 564, 569,
Hundred-Poem Sequences in the 573, 576, 648, 683, 748, 753
Second Year of the Shōji Era, Sōanshū. See Tonna
1200), 232 Sōboku (d. 1545), 326
shōjo shōsetsu (girls’ novel), 748 Soga monogatari (Tale of the Revenge
Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan of the Soga Brothers), 290, 306–7,
Continued, 797), 26–7, 29, 32, 33–5, 438, 439
37, 46 Soga no Umako (d. 626), 36
Shokugosenshū (Shokugosen wakashū, 1251), Sōgi (1421–1502), 160, 214, 252, 266–7, 322–6, 406
242–3; see also Fujiwara no Tameie Chikurinshō (The Bamboo Grove
Shokukokinshū (Later Collection of Ancient Collection, 1476), 323–4
and Modern Times, 1265), 250 Oi no susami (An Old Man’s Diversions,
Shōmonki (The Record of Masakado, 935–40), 1479), 324
290–1, 297–8 Shirakawa kikō (Record of a Journey to
Shōmu, Emperor (701–56), 65–6, 69, 76–7, 83 Shirakawa, 1468), 266
Shōno Junzō (1921–2009), 731 Tsukushi no michi no ki (Record of the Road
Shōno Yoriko (b. 1956), 765 to Tsukushi, 1480), 266
shōsetsu. See fiction, hon’an shōsetsu, jitsuroku- Sōkonshū. See Shōtetsu
tai shōsetsu, katei shōsetsu, keitai sōmon (exchange poem), 54, 63, 77, 78, 83
shōsetsu, kyōyō shōsetsu, novel, seiji Sonezaki shinjū. See Chikamatsu Monzaemon
shōsetsu, shishōsetsu, shōjo shōsetsu, song. See ancient songs, imayō, kagura, rōei,
taishū shōsetsu, Tsubouchi Shōyō: saibara, utagaki, wasan
Shōsetsu shinzui Song dynasty, 192, 215, 311, 314, 316, 379, 465–7,
Junsui shōsetsu-ron, 667 479, 484, 489
kusa-zōshi and the notion of, 518–19 Sono Ayako (b. 1931), 743
otogizōshi and the notion of, 357 Sōseki (1474–1533), 325, 326
Shōtetsu (1381–1459), 214, 244, 250–2, 321, Sotoba Komachi. See Kan’ami Kiyotsugu
323, 344 sovereign, 5, 95–7, 161, 211–12, 287–9, chapter 3;
Shōtetsu monogatari (Conversations with see also individual emperors
Shōtetsu, c. 1448–50), 227 and
Sōkonshū (Grass Roots Anthology), 250–1 fudoki, 45, 46–7
Shōtoku, Prince (Shōtoku Taishi, trad. Kaifūsō, 86–90
574–622), 31, 36, 37–8, 56, 87, 346 Kojiki, 23–6
Shōtoku taishi denryaku (Chronicle Biography Man’yōshū, 50–1, 54–7, 58–62, 64–6, 76–7,
of Prince Shōtoku, 10th c.), 38 80, 82–5
Shufu no tomo (The Housewives’ Friend, Nihon shoki, 28–33
1917–2008), 645, 663 Sendai kuji hongi, 36
Shūishū (Shūi wakashū, Collection of Shoku Nihongi, 34
Gleanings of Poems, 1005–7), 106, 111, waka, 101, 111–13; see also imperial poetry
117, 119, 223, 229 anthology
Shukke to sono deshi. See Kurata Hyakuzō women’s writing in the Heian period,
Shun’e (1113–91), 261 99, 100
Shunshoku tatsumi no sono. See Tamenaga modern emperor system, 556–7, 562–3, 607,
Shunsui 626, 661, 665
Shunshoku umegoyomi. See Tamenaga Shunsui Sōyō (d. 1563), 326
Shūron (A Religious Dispute), 352 storytelling, 7, 9–10, 291, 308, 309–10, 356, 427,
Shusse Kagekiyo. See Chikamatsu Monzaemon 523–4, 579; see also etoki, goze, katari-
Shuten Dōji (The Demon Shuten Dōji), mono, kōdan, otoshi-banashi, rakugo,
359–60, 368–9, 400 sekkyō, sekkyō-bushi, sekkyō-jōruri,
Silla, 31, 68, 69, 78, 81, 86, 91 setsuwa
Sinitic, Literary. See kanbun Su Dongpo, 466
Sino-Japanese. See kanbun Suehiro Tetchō (1849–96), 582

842
 Index

Sugawara denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and Takayama Sōzei (d. 1455), 321
the Secrets of Calligraphy, 1746), 433, Takebe Ayatari (1719–74), 410, 492, 496–8,
443–4, 453 499, 500
Sugawara no Fumitoki (899–981), 178, 180, Honchō Suikoden (A Water Margin in this
190–1 Realm, part 1, 1773; part 2, incomplete,
Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), 5, 6, 95, 97, 1774), 496–7
125, 173, 177, 190, 203, 444, chapter 8 Nishiyama monogatari (Tale of the Western
Sugawara no Takasue no musume (b. 1008) Hills, 1768), 496–7
Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari (after Oriorigusa (Tales from Now and Again,
1058), 142, 145–7, 150 1771), 496
Sarashina nikki (Sarashina Diary, c. 1059), 8, Takeda Izumo (d. 1747), 441, 453, 512, 513
98, 99, 135–6, 142, 165, 173–4 Takeda Izumo II (or Koizumo I, 1691–1756),
Yoru no Nezame (Wakefulness/Nezame at 433, 443
Night), 142–4, 150 Takeda Seiji (b. 1947), 758
Suiko, Empress (trad. r. 592–628), 23, 31–2, 36, 56 Takeda Taijun (1912–76), 686–7, 688–9, 722
Sukeroku, 430, 452 Takemiya Keiko (b. 1950), 750
Sumiyoshi monogatari, 150 Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), 431, 439,
Sumiyoshi taisha jindaiki (Record of the Age 440–1, 442
of the Gods of the Great Sumiyoshi Takemukigaki. See Hi no Meishi
Shrine), 35–6 Taketori monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo
Cutter, c. 909), 79, 98, 121, 122–3, 124,
Tachibana Akemi (1812–68), 476–7 126, 127, 137
Tachibana Narisue, 282 Takeuchi Kakusai (1770–1826), 540
Tachibana no Moroe (684–757), 75–6, 84 Takeuchi Naoko (b. 1967), 752
Tachihara Michizō (1914–39), 237, 716 Takeyama Michio (1903–84), 687–8
Tada Nanrei (1698–1750), 447 Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–79), 714
Tadanori. See Zeami Motokiyo Tale of Genji. See Murasaki Shikibu
Taiheiki (Chronicle of Great Peace, c. 1370), 7, Tales of Heike. See Heike monogatari
212, 213, 215, 278, 303, 306, 309–10, 331, Tales of Ise. See Ise monogatari
390, 439–40, 444, 450, 495 Tales of Times Now Past. See Konjaku monogatari
Taira no Kiyomori (1118–81), 271, 288–9, 291, Tamekane-kyō wakashō. See Kyōgoku
292, 295–7, 304, 307 Tamekane
taishū bungaku (mass literature), 761–7 Tamenaga Itchō, 447
taishū shōsetsu (popular fiction), 612 Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1844), 377, 529, 530
Tajihi no Agatamori (?–737), 68 Shunshoku tatsumi no sono (Spring-Color
Takabatake Ransen (1838–85), 579 Southeast Garden, 1833–5), 533
Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959), 617 Shunshoku umegoyomi (Spring-Color
Chōsen (Korea, 1912), chapter 69 Plum Calendar, 1832–3), 533–5, 581
Takahashi Gen’ichirō (b. 1951), 765 Tamura Ryūichi (1923–98), 717
Takahashi Mutsuo (b. 1937), 766 Tamura Taijirō (1911–83), 688–9
Takahashi no Mushimaro (fl. 720s–c. 737), 65, Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945), 642–3
74–6, 81 Tanabe no Sakimaro (fl. 740s), 76
Takahashi Takako (1932–2013), 744, 745–6 Tanaka Chikao (1905–95), 707
Takahashi ujibumi (Account of the Tane maku hito (The Sower, est. 1921), 658–9
Takahashi Lineage Group, 789), 35 Tang dynasty, 17, 19, 20, 39, 45, 58, 69, 82, 88,
Takami Jun (1907–65), 667 102, 103, 105, 121, 123–4, 184, 186, 190,
Takamitsu nikki (Takamitsu Diary, aka 192, 314, 316, 389, 459–60, 462, 465–7,
Tōnomine Shōshō monogatari, c. 962), 482, 497
125, 166 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), 139, 626,
Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), 719–20 629–33, 669, 693–5, 697, 705, 733
Dōtei (Journey, 1913), 621, 712 tanka (short poem), 219, 222, 645, 662; see also
Takasago. See Zeami Motokiyo waka, and references to individual poems
Takatsu Kuwasaburō (1864–1921), 565–7, 654 in chapters 5 and 23

843
 Index

tanka (short poem) (cont.) Tonna (or Ton’a, 1289–1372), 247–9, 252, 253,
and 265, 317, 318, 323
azuma-uta, 77 Sōanshū (The Grass Hut Collection,
fudoki, 48 1359), 248
Man’yōshū, 50, 53–4 Tōnomine Shōshō monogatari. See Takamitsu
Shinkokinshū, 230 nikki
Tao Qian (365–427), 58, 72, 490, 494 Tōrai Sanna, 520
Tao Yuanming (365–427), 461 Torikaebaya monogatari, 147–9, 150, 153–4
Taoism, 20, 58, 68, 71, 72, 90, 123, 490 Toriyama Shiken (1655–1715), 459, 462
Tatsumi fugen (Women’s Words From the Tosa nikki. See Ki no Tsurayuki
Southeast, 1798), 528 Toshiyori zuinō. See Minamoto no Toshiyori
Tawada Yōko (b. 1960), 766 Towazugatari. See Lady Nijō
Tayama Katai (1872–1930), 570, 590, 595–6, 624 Toyama Masakazu (1848–1900), 613
Futon (The Quilt, 1907), 596, 682 travel. See also chishi, dōchūki, kikō, meishoki,
Inaka kyōshi (Country Teacher, 1909), meisho-zue, michiyuki
650–2 and
Tayasu Munetake (1715–71), 484 early modern literature, 409–10, 420, 469,
tayū (chanter), 427, 437, 446 496, 522, 524–7
Tazawa Inafune (1874–96), 601–2, 603 Heian diary, 98, 99, 166–7, 170, 173, 175
Teimon school, 404–5, 406, 417, 508 medieval diary, 269, 270, 274–5, 276, 277,
and Danrin haikai, 405 278–9
Tengu no dairi (The Palace of the Tengu), medieval recluse literature, 266–7
358–9 modern literature, 575
Tenji, Emperor (r. 668–71), 17, 18, 20, 31, 58–9, and colonialism, 638, 683–91, chapters 69
61, 83, 86–7, 256 and 70
Tenjiku Tokubei ikokubanashi. See Tsuruya renga poets, 323, 325–6
Nanboku IV poems in
Tenmu, Emperor (r. 673–86), 18–20, 27, 31, 32, Kokinshū, 117
55, 58, 59–62, 87 Man’yōshū, 52, 54, 60, 61, 63–4, 65, 67, 70,
Tentoku dairi uta-awase (Palace Poetry Match 74, 76, 81
of the Tentoku Era, 960), 118 Shinkokinshū, 230
Terakado Seiken (1796–1868), 574 traveling storyteller, 213, 216–17; see also
Edo Hanjōki (Prosperous Tales of Edo, biwa hōshi, goze
1832–6), 448, 470 Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), 567, 570, 582,
terakoya (private elementary school), 373, 389 585–6, 589, 600, 624, 628, 703–5, 706
Terayama Shūji (1935–83), 708–9 Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel,
theater, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 139, 211, 213, 376, 377, 379, 1885–6), 560–2, 566, 585, 703
415, 507, 520, 546–7, 596–7, 606, 733–4; Tōsei shosei katagi (Manners and Lives of
see also bunraku, chaban, jōruri, kabuki, Contemporary Students, 1885–6),
ko-jōruri, kōwakamai, kyōgen, noh, 422–3, 560
shingeki, shinpa theater, chapters 34–7, Tsuda Mamichi (1829–1903), 554
43–5, 72, and 73 Tsuga Teishō (1718–after 1794), 410, 492,
Tō no Tsuneyori (1401–84), 160, 212, 323 494–5, 497, 500, 539
Tōin Kinsada, 309 Hanabusa sōshi (A Garland of Heroes, 1749),
Tōkaidō meisho zue. See Akizato Ritō 494, 495
Tōkaidō meishoki. See Asai Ryōi Shigeshige yawa (Flourishing in the Wilds,
Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan. See Tsuruya 1766), 494
Nanboku IV Tsuji Jun (1884–1944), 644
Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige. See Jippensha Ikku Tsuka Kōhei (1948–2010), 709
Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1700), 459 tsukeku (added verse), 317, 319, 321, 404,
Tokunaga Sunao (1899–1958), 666–7, 668 407, 508
Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), 563 and senryū, 508
Tomioka Taeko (b. 1935), 717 Tsukuba mondō. See Nijō Yoshimoto

844
 Index

Tsukubashū. See Nijō Yoshimoto Unzen Taikyoku, 304

tsukuri-monogatari (fictional tale), 125–8 Urabe Kanekata (fl. late 13th c.), 33
Tsukushi no michi no ki. See Sōgi Urami no suke, 400
Tsurayuki-shū. See Ki no Tsurayuki Urashima Tarō, 75
Tsurezuregusa. See Yoshida Kenkō ushin (deep refined sensibility), 228, 241,
Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829), 434, 453, 250–1, 254
455–6 Usuyuki monogatari (Tale of Light Snow, early
Tenjiku Tokubei ikokubanashi (The Tale of 17th c.), 400
Tokubei from India, 1804), 455 uta-awase (poetry matches), 99, 101, 112–14,
Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan (Tōkaidō, Ghost 118, 119, 149–50, 158, 225, 232, 239; see
Stories at Yotsuya, 1825), 378, 430 also Roppyakuban uta-awase
Tsushima Yūko (b. 1947), 746–7 utagaki (ritual of song and frolicking youth),
Tsutsumi chūnagon monogatari (The Stories of 48–9, 74
the Riverside Middle Counselor), utamakura (poetic toponym), 120, 269
101, 140 uta-monogatari (poem tale), 98, 99, 126, 158,
tsūzokubon (“popularized version” of books), 283, 299
541, 542 Utatane. See Nun Abutsu
tsuzuki-mono (serialized reports), 584–5 Utei Enba (1743–1822), 436, 523, 529
Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu (The Composition Utsuho monogatari (The Tale of the Cavern,
Class, 1938), 700 late 10th c.), 126–7, 137, 141, 143, 151, 152
Twenty Cases of Unfilial Piety in Our Land.
See Ihara Saikaku vendetta (katakiuchi), 306–7, 363, 378, 394, 395,
429, 439–40, 443, 444, 445, 522, 530,
Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), 564, 568 540, 627
Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), 380, 381, 411, 474,
492, 499–502, 539 wabi (subdued simplicity), 216, 265
Harusame monogatari (Tales of the Spring waka, 6, 10–11, 91, 95–6, 108, 189–90, 377, 396;
Rain, 1808, revised but incomplete, see also imperial poetry anthology
1809), 501–2 (chokusenshū), individual entries on
Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and chokusenshū titles, karon, kyōka,
Rain, 1776), 474, 500, 501, 700 Man’yōshū, tanka, chapters 5, 9, 22–25,
Ueda Bin (1874–1916), 619–22, 629 and 48
Ueda Hiroshi (1905–66), 667 and
Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), 569–70, 652, 743 aristocratic culture, 4–5, 97–8, 101, 281
Ugetsu monogatari. See Ueda Akinari diary, 165–6, 268–9
Uji dainagon monogatari (Collection of Tales Genji monogatari, 135–7, 149, 392
from Uji), 282 genre hierarchy, 3–4, 378
Uji Kaganojō (1635–1711), 431 haikai, chapter 41
Uji shūi monogatari, 39, 282, 283, 286 imayō, 206–8
Ukai (The Cormorant Fisher), 332–3 Kamo no Mabuchi, 484–5
Ukiyo monogatari. See Asai Ryōi Kokugaku, 379
Ukiyo-buro. See Shikitei Sanba kyōka, chapter 51
Ukiyo-doko. See Shikitei Sanba literary genres, 98, 99, 125–6
ukiyo-e, 376, 418, 434, 445, 520, 528, 628 Masaoka Shiki, 573
ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), 377, modern Japanese poetry, 613–22
379, 380, 415, 418, 420, 421, 422, 430, 495, Motoori Norinaga, 486–7
499, 513, 539 Murasaki Shikibu, 134
Ukyō no Daibu (c. 1157–?), 300–1 noh, 335, 340–1, 344
Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū (The Nun Abutsu, 274–5
Collection of Lady Daibu, c. 1232), recluse literature, 259, 260
268, 271–2, 300–1 renga, chapter 33
Uno Chiyo (1897–1996), 647, 740 samurai, 211–12
Uno Kōji (1891–1961), 630 Sei Shōnagon, 161

845
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waka (cont.) and imperial poetry anthology, 118, 155

Sugawara no Michizane, 106, 107 in 19th century Japan, 535, 562–3
Yosa Buson, 493 performers, 427, 437, chapter 20; see also
commentary. chapters 13, and 22; see also goze, shirabyōshi
karon poets, 58–9, 77, 88, 118, 119, 572, 618–19,
in 717–18
Ben no Naishi nikki, 272 writings by, 97–100, 155–6, 193–4, chapters
Fūyōshū, 155–6 11, 12, 14, 15, 27, 61, 66, and 76; see also
Heike monogatari, 299 individual writers
Ise monogatari, 124 World War I (1914–18), 630, 645, 696
Man’yōshū, chapter 5 World War II (1939–45), 80, 175, 286, 354, 429,
Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki, 276 632, 671, 725
Tale of Toyokage, 125 writing system, 1, 16–18, 26–8, 51, 84–5; see also
the Kamakura period, 213–14 gender and writing systems and
the Meiji period, 564, 565 styles, kana, kanbun, kanji, kundoku,
the Muromachi period, 214 logography, phonography, wakan-
Ukyō no Daibu shū, 271–2 konkōbun
Wakan rōeishū, 185–7
influence on kanshi, 461–2 Xiao jing (Classic of Filial Piety,
Waka kuhon. See Fujiwara no Kintō J. Kōkyō), 384
Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864–96), 600, 602–3 Xie Lingyun (385–443), 58
Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and
Chinese Poems to Sing, early 11th c.), yakazu haikai (rapid solo haikai
6, 98, 120, 178, 185–7, 190, 223; see also sequences), 417
Fujiwara no Kintō Yakusha kuchi samisen. See Ejima Kiseki
wakan-konkōbun (mixed Sino-Japanese style Yamabe no Akahito (fl. 724–36), 65–7, 74–6,
writing), 2, 283, 299, 309, 500, 567 81, 83
wa-kan-yō konkōbun (Japanese-Chinese- Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), 585, 599
Western mixed-style writing), Yamada Eimi (b. 1959), 762, 763, 765
568, 569 Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), 496
Wang Gai (1645–1707), 493–4 Yamagusuku Seichū (1884–1949), 753
Wang Shizhen (1526–90), 482 Yamamoto Hokuzan (1752–1812), 467
Wang Wei, 459, 461 Yamamoto Yūzō (1887–1974), 700, 706
Wang Xizhi (321–79, or 307–65), 69 Yamanoue (or Yamanoe) no Okura (660–c.
war. See Genpei War, Korean War, Ōnin 733), 65, 67–70, 71–4, 75, 77, 82, 83
War, Russo-Japanese War, Second Yamato monogatari (Tales of Yamato, c. 951),
Sino-Japanese War, Sino-Japanese 75, 112, 124, 276
War, World War I, World War II Yamato Takeru, 25–6
warrior tale. See gunki-mono Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82), 462, 480
wasan (Buddhist hymns), 208, 214 Yamazaki Sōkan, 326, 404
washū (Japanese stylistic influence in kanbun), Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), 280
459, 468 Yang Sŏk-il (b. 1936), 759
Wataya Risa (b. 1984), 765 Yang Yi (b. 1964), 670, 765–6
Wenxuan (Selections of Refined Literature, J. Yano Ryūkei (1851–1931), 559–60, 561, 567
Monzen, early 6th c.), 20, 48, 54, 58, 67, Keikoku bidan (Commendable Anecdotes
70, 87, 89, 184, 189–90, 192 on Creating a Nation, 1883–4), 559,
Woman Who Loved Love. See Ihara Saikaku 560, 581–2
women. See also fujin zasshi, gender, girls’ Yashima (or Yashima no ikusa, The Battle of
magazine and manga, nyosho, and Yashima), 364
education for: premodern aristocratic Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013), 731, 732, 740, 744
women, women in the early modern Yi Yang-ji (1955–92), 758–9, 765
period, women in the modern period Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), 630, 657, 667,
and cinema, 698 684–6, 695–6, 698

846
 Index

yomihon (reading books), 369, 377, 378, 379, 387, You xianku. See Zhang Zhou
393, 510, 513, 515, 518, 520, 558–9, 560, Yu Miri (b. 1968), 670, 709, 759, 767
561–2, chapters 50 and 55 Yu Yue (1821–1907), 459, 575
Yorimasa. See Zeami Motokiyo Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610), 462, 467
Yosa (Yoza) Buson (1716–83), 375, 380, 381, Yuan Mei (1716–98), 462
410–13, 492–4 Yuasa Hangetsu (1858–1943), 615
Shinhanatsumi (New Flower yūgen (mystery and depth), 216, 227, 228, 239,
Gathering), 412 248, 319, 334, 341, 342–3, 346, 620
Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), 139, 237, 618–19, Yūryaku, Emperor, 26, 39, 41, 55–6, 83
624, 645, 646 Yūshi hōgen (Playboy Dialect, 1770), 375–6
Midare-gami (Tangled Hair, 1901), 618, 645 Yutai xinyong (New Songs from a Jade
Yosano Tekkan (1873–1935), 618, 620, 621, 624 Terrace, c. 545), 20, 58
Yoshida Kenkō (c. 1283–c. 1352), chapter 26 Yuyama sangin hyakuin (Three Poets at
Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, c. 1331), 7, Yuyama, 1491), 325
162, 263–5, 284, 302, 385
Yoshida Mitsuru (1923–79), 725 zainichi literature, 765, chapter 79
Yoshida Shūichi (b. 1968), 764 zange-mono (Buddhist confessional
Yoshii Isamu (1886–1960), 624 discourses), 419
Yoshikawa Eiji (1892–1962), 649, 699 Zeami Motokiyo (1363?–1443?), 6–7, 8–9, 216,
Yoshimoto Banana (b. 1964), 761, 762, 763 328–9, 332–3, 334–9, 347, 429, chapter 35
Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012), 717 Fūshi kaden (Transmission of the Flower
Yoshinaga Fumi (b. 1971), 752 through Style and Form, 1400–18),
Yoshishige no Yasutane, 191 340, 341, 346
Yoshitsune senbon zakura (Yoshitsune and the Kyūi (Nine Ranks, c. 1428), 341–2, 344
Thousand Cherry Trees, 1747), 432, Sandō (The Three Paths), 334, 343
443, 444, 453 Tadanori, 336
Yoshiyuki Eisuke (1906–40), 684 Takasago, 335
Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (1924–94), 731 Yorimasa, 336
Yōsō (1376–1458), 315 Zekkai Chūshin (1336–1405), 313–14, 315
yotsugi no monogatari (succession tale), 202, Zhang Zhou (c. 657–730)
298–9 You xianku (A Dalliance in the Immortals’
Yotsugi Soga. See Chikamatsu Monzaemon Den), 58, 70, 121–2
Yotsutsuji Yoshinari (1326–1402) Zhu Xi (1130–1200), 379, 469, 479–82, 484
Kakaishō (The River and Sea Commentary, zōka (miscellaneous poems), 54, 77, 78, 83
c. 1387), 136–7 zuihitsu (free-form essay), 162, 205, 215,
Yotsuya kaidan. See Tsuruya Nanboku IV 259, 284

847